Could I use Java or c#? [was: Re: re-writingcollege books]

[Kevin.Wall at qwest.com (Wall, Kevin)]

Crispin Cowan wrote...
> mikeiscool wrote:
...
> > True, but that doesn't mean runtime portability isn't a 
> good thing to aim for.
> >
> It means that compromising performance to obtain runtime portability
> that does not actually exist is a poor bargain.

To me, the bigger loss than performance is all the functionality that
you give up to gain the portability. E.g., because several system calls
(in a functional/feature way, not the _specific_ sys calls) aren't
portable
across all OSes that Sun wanted to support with Java, they dumbed down
the list to the lowest common demoninator. That makes a Java
inappropriate
for a lot of system-level programming tasks. Simple example: There's no
way
in pure Java that I can lock a process in memory. Wrt this list, that
has
a lot of security ramifications especially on shared processors. Sure
makes
hiding secrets a lot harder.

Plea to moderator: Ken: While I find this debate interesting, I think it
        has little to do with secure coding. I'm trying to bring it back
on
        track a bit, but I fear that it is too far gone. My vote is to
kill
        this topic unless someone has a major objection or we can make
it
        relevant to security. Thanks.

-kevin
---
Kevin W. Wall           Qwest Information Technology, Inc.
Kevin.Wall at qwest.com Phone: 614.215.4788
"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students
 that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers
 they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration"
    - Edsger Dijkstra, How do we tell truths that matter?
      http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD04xx/EWD498.html


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