On 04/09/2010 03:21, Paul Rubin wrote:
Lawrence D'Oliveiro<l...@geek-central.gen.new_zealand> writes:
Java has considerably greater reputation for reliability than C or C++.
Wonder why Sun’s licence explicitly forbade its use in danger-critical
areas like nuclear power plants and the like, then?
Probably because Sun lawyers demanded it. Is there a Sun C or C++
compiler with a license that doesn't have that restriction? Even if
there is, it just means those languages are so unreliable that the
lawyers felt confident that any meltdown could be blamed on a bug in the
user's rather than the compiler ;-).
Let’s put it this way: the life-support system on the International Space
Station is written in Ada. Would you trust your life to code written in
Java?
The scary thing is I don't know whether I'm already doing that. Life
support systems have hard real-time requirements (Ada's forte) but I'd
expect lots of military decision-support systems are written in Java.
Maybe one of them will raise a false alert and somebody will launch a
war.
I thought it was just that if it wasn't explicitly forbidden then
someone might try to use it and then sue if something went wrong, even
though common sense would have said that it was a bad idea in the first
place! :-)
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