Lawrence D'Oliveiro <l...@geek-central.gen.new_zealand> writes: > And yet Java code, for example, doesn’t have a reputation for greater > reliability compared to, say code written in Ada or C++, or even C. What is > the Java runtime written in? C. Why not use Java, if there is no speed > penalty in doing so?
The Java runtime (such as the garbage collector) needs untyped pointers and can't be written in Java. It might be possible to write a type-safe GC in something like ATS, which has extremely precise types, but that is almost alien technology by comparison to writing in C. Java has considerably greater reputation for reliability than C or C++. Ada is a different story, but Ada programs (because of the application area Ada is used in) tend not to use a lot of dynamic memory allocation in the first place. A little googling shows there are GC extensions available for Ada, though I don't know if they are used much. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
