Hi All, I try not to post off-topic on the POI lists, but the other day while I was explaining how I think Sun's reluctance to change the Java VM is detrimental to the oncoming Java vs .NET issue, I realized just how topical it is.
In POI we deal with primitive types alot as one might expect. We have a tremendous battle with organizing this information because of its inappropriate mismapping to "not an object". Sun has a JSR that implements C++ style templates and we do need templates in Java. The problem is the approach they're taking would do nothing to really alleviate or solve our problem because it does not handle primitives and does not even actually handle "generics". It handles "generics" by compiling special versions of the classes. So basically you get x many class$1 files such as one gets with inner classes, etc. We need to inform Sun that this is the wrong decision, that we need a more appropriate method of handling generic types in Java. We'd be able to decomplicate sections of POI and reduce our memory footprint substantially should this be fixed. (handling of generics by the VM, including primitives ). So please vote for the following bug in support of this effort: http://developer.java.sun.com/developer/bugParade/bugs/4487555.html This is often seen in my tagline, but I'm not sure anyone understands the issue. Perhaps Marc has some additional comments or suggestions on this that he can post to the group as he's a bit more cerebral than I :-).. -Andy
