Will Sun Open Source Java?

capt turnpike writes "According to eWEEK.com, there's an internal debate going on at Sun whether to open-source Java. (Insert typical response: "It's about time!") Company spokespersons have no official comment, as might be expected, but perhaps we could hear confirmation or denial as early as May 16, at the JavaOne conference. One commentator said, "Sun should endorse PHP and go one step forward and make sure the 'P' languages run great on the JVM [Java virtual machine] by open-sourcing Java." Would this move Java up the desirability scale in your eyes? Could this be a way to help improve what's lacking in Java?"

Comments

Re:Third-Party JVM

[Reverend528]

There are two main causes of java slowness. The most well-known is swing, the java graphics api which has one too many layers of indirection to be useful. The other main problem is Checked Exceptions, which force a programmer to write "try{" before the body of every method and "} catch (Exception e) {}" after the body. Although relatively useless (if not harmful), these checked exceptions lead to a minimum of 122 extra CPU cycles per method invocation.

Luckily, you there are workarounds, such as using Eclipse instead of swing and a different language to avoid checked exceptions.

Re:This would help

[m50d]

uTorrent is doing exactly what you should do - use the platform library rather than reimplementing everything yourself. If java would do the same - use the system window drawing functions, high level network access, etc, rather than a few primitives and then reimplementing everything else in java, we'd be a lot better off.

And more importantly.....

[leereyno]

....will I care?

The older I get the more absurd all this becomes. Once upon a time I might have actually cared whether Sun put their version of the JDK out under an open source license. I might have cared whether Sun submitted the Java specification to an independent standards body. Those days have come and gone because I know that it doesn't matter. Sun, like all companies run by mere mortals with all our imperfections, suffers from that stultifying combination of myopia and paranoia that seems to define most every company past a certain age and beyond a certain size. Sun is not a monolithic entity. Rest assured that if the left hand were to free Java, the right hand would look for a way to return it to the cage. Java is what it is, and Sun is what it is. It isn't going to get any better so stop holding your breath.

Lee

Re:No

[penguin-collective]

Will people stop trying to move Java towards a culture that won't keep Java up to the same standards Sun has?

Indeed. It would take the open source community years to beat Sun Java into shape: both the platform and the implementation are far below the quality that successful open source projects would tolerate.

The next time I look at another configured by altering it's code, hard tied to MySQL, non-tiered POS LAMP application, I'm going to cry.

The bloat and wasted man-years behind every J2EE application used to want to make me cry, but I just take it in stride. Of course, I see fewer and fewer of them percentage-wise.

There's a reason why the top two server side platform these days are .NET and Java,

"Top" in arrogance and pay, at least, if not in the number of sites based on it.

Re:too little too late

[alext]

"too little too late"

I'd say this tag better fits Mono. Mono will always be behind Dotnet by definition, and Java applications outstrip Mono by approximately 1000 to 1.