Christopher Wright wrote:
This opens you up to certain bugs,
Yes, the bug where module A depends on module B being initialized first, yet B imports A. With this patch, it may or may not work correctly, as order of initialization for cyclic imports will be unpredictable.
but they should be relatively rare.
But nasty, as they tend to show up when porting or updating the compiler or build system, long after the original programmer left. Furthermore, these bugs may go undetected at QA time if nobody put a test for proper initialization in the test suite.
Java is a very portable language, not because of the VM, but because it tries to eliminate all implementation and undefined behavior. It hasn't been 100% successful at that, but this facet of Java has, in my opinion, been a big factor in the wide adoption of Java.
In contrast, only experienced C and C++ programmers are able to write code that ports reliably. Experience at having been burned by implementation and undefined language behavior. This is no longer acceptable in a language.
I've tried it, and it appears to work.
That's the problem with undefined behavior :-(, it only appears to work. It is not guaranteed to work.
