"System call semantics?"

Posted May 18, 2006 7:24 UTC (Thu) by pimlott (guest, #1535)
In reply to: "System call semantics?" by cventers
Parent article: Java becomes more distributable

what would be the value of Sun "picking on" a Linux vendor because of supposed incompatibilities?

I suspect a more realistic scenario is: Java's threading is implemented using POSIX pthreads, but Linux threads aren't quite POSIX. This was in fact the case until recently, the cause of much griping by thread programmers (pour souls) and contention among Linux hackers. I believe this issue is now quite resolved, but if it weren't, I can imagine Sun refusing to allow distributors who ship the non-standard Linux threads to also ship Sun's Java. It's not too much of a stretch that this would tip the distributor's decision to switch to a new thread library. This could indeed break some other program relying on the old thread behavior.

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"System call semantics?"

Posted May 18, 2006 16:49 UTC (Thu) by jonabbey (guest, #2736) [Link] (1 responses)

Actually, Java's threading semantics have always been relatively underspecified, specifically to make it possible to have Jave implementations on a wide variety of underlying operating systems.

Remember Java on Macintosh OS 9? ;-)

"System call semantics?"

Posted May 18, 2006 16:58 UTC (Thu) by pimlott (guest, #1535) [Link]

Remember Java on Macintosh OS 9? ;-)

checkmate, you win