On Jan 11, 2005, at 4:08 PM, Jason Aaron Osgood wrote:

> I tried to build Sun's JDK a few years back. It was crap. I can
> vouche for some of Slava's observations. Such as the preprocessor
> stuff. (For Java source code too!)

Preprocessors are *hip* baby. Java5 has one called apt. Yeah, sure, we
call them "annotation processors" now, but hey, once a duck, always a
duck.

I also can't agree with every criticism in the referenced blog post.
Generating bytecode to call reflected methods actually sounds pretty
cool to me, since now suddenly that bytecode is subject to Hotspot
optomizing, inlining, etc.

However I think the biggest lesson to take away from this is that
proprietary source bases inherently grow cruft, because:

a) nobody thinks that anybody else is ever going to read their code
anyway and
b) they can't take advantage of the janitorial services of up and
coming developers who are trying to learn there way around, and
cleaning up stuff as they go.

After, consider the lesson of the original Netscape source release, 90%
of which was flushed after a couple months of milling around, and very
little of which made it in to what we now call Mozilla.

Can beauty survive the pressure of commercial release cycles?

-wilhelm