Alan Kent wrote: > My main fear of Java based libraries (say driven from Scala) is you > never know if there are 'static's hiding there somewhere, making it not > thread safe, and making actors not really be isolated as they should. > Scala Actors beefed up a bit to make scaling across machines dead easy > (so you don't have to change a line of code to distribute your actors > across machines) I think would go a long way. (Maybe its there already > - but last time I checked Actor message passing was really only done > well within a single JVM.) > In some way Java will be to its next language what C was to Java: something you can call, but you need to be very careful. If we assume that the new language runs on a JVM, then you should at least not have the platform-dependency issues, but in terms of making assertions about concurrency calling Java code from a nicer JVM language will always be an issue.
That is actually a major concern for me at the moment. All the new languages claim good support for writing applications that call into Java libraries, but I would like to see the opposite: something I can write safe libraries in that a Java developer can call. I'm often in the position where I am probably the person on the team that has the most skills in library design and I am personally quite happy to mix languages. Other team members are happy as Java Developers and just want to get the tools to get the job done. For me it would be ideal to write libraries in a better language if I can provide the rest of the team with APIs that look no different from those written in Java. Of course you could write a (nearly) pure interface-based API in Java (not a bad idea in general) and then implement that in another JVM language, but I somehow get the impression that this scenario is not in the focus of most of the new breed of JVM languages. And as long as the new language tries to support everything Java code might throw at it, it will IMO always be inferior to what could be. I'd like to see a language that can be called by Java, is much stronger typed than Java but can't handle Java code. But that's of course only for library developers :-) One thing I have been wondering about is the question if it would be possible to design a language that comes in two flavors: one that is really typesafe, and then another that extends the typesystem with Java's dodgy bits. That way one language could be used either way: as a bottom layer or a top layer (or something in the middle). Peter --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
