Nelson Minar (nelson@media.mit.edu)
Mon, 22 Mar 1999 11:10:35 -0500 (EST)
Hello there, we've had a great first week for the Javares list! We're up to over 100 subscribers, and have already had some good conversation. I think a lot of us have thought about these issues for awhile in different ways, it's good to air out some of the ideas. I'm glad to say we've added a fourth volunteer list host: Grzegorz Czajkowski, of Cornell and JRes fame. He'll help us keep the list going and the conversation flowing. The main thing I've learned in the discussion this last week is that even if Thread.stop() could be made to work, it's not really the right solution for dealing with problematic code. Instead, one needs to have some more general way to easily revoke resources from a chunk of code. The big thing missing here is a good way to control the CPU resource itself; Java so far is nice about controlling things like files, but not so much CPU time or memory usage. Another interesting theme has been the idea of Java as an operating system, a kernel that protects certain resources. I've always thought of Java this way (first, as an OS for applets, now as an OS for mobile agents). However, it's really not quite up to that task: limited resource control and an unhealthy amount of global state. One thing I would like to see come out of this mailing list eventually is a consensus, possibly a proposal for resource control in Java so that it can be a more effective OS. I think we've got a variety of topics on resource accounting to air first, but maybe we can keep this goal in mind as we discuss. nelson@media.mit.edu . . . . . . . . http://www.media.mit.edu/~nelson/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe (or other requests) mailto:majordomo@media.mit.edu List archives, FAQ, member list, etc. http://gee.cs.oswego.edu/dl/javares/
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