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A few comments from 'The Other Side'
I've been
reading your blog since I'm doing occasionally stuff in .net, but java is where my heart is. But this entry
gave me the creeps so I couldn't resist commenting on this blog entry of
Desmet.
If you're using JDK5 (and it seems you did) you may have noticed
that new ArrayList().add(1) actually works. So boxing and unboxing has made it into Java too (Although I'm
not sure this is a good thing).
Second the collections framework in java is imho far better than
.net, first of all there is no common interface for (non-)generic collections in .Net. So
System.Collection.Arraylist doesn't implement System.Collection.Collection or whatever, like they do in
java. This would actually allow components to be written that take collections as an interface, regardless
of how they're implemented. Or to have open source alternatives, that could turn out to be
faster/lighter.
On the backwards compatibility, while it's true SUN could have opted for putting
them in a seperate package, they didn't. And quite frankly It doesn't even bother me that the compiler warns
me about it, since I can either disable them or use generics. What this has to do with versioning hell is a
big question mark for me. Java hasn't suffered from versioning hell like .net does. We do however have our
own issues like ClassNotFoundExceptions, ClassLoaders and stuff.
Although things have improved
since the 'COM' days, I don't know about something like class loaders in .net that allows usage of separate
versions of the same package in the same program. And then we didn't discuss about the backwards
compatibility between .Net2.0 and 1.(0|1) which is if you ask me questionable.
As far as startup
time is concerned, well the statement that .net is 2,2 times faster than java based on a simple program like
that, where the JVM has the disadvantage of not being partially loaded into memory already, I'll leave that
to you.
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