[fedora-java] Re: Java on Fedora faq

Mark Wielaard mark at klomp.org
Wed Jul 27 10:48:24 UTC 2005


On Wed, 2005-07-27 at 10:11 +0100, Gary Benson wrote:
> Robin Green wrote:
> > [Footnote 1] - I found a bug in AspectJ yesterday which only
> > appeared under libgcj, but *wasn't* a libgcj bug. It was a latent
> > bug in AspectJ that was only exposed by a slightly different, but
> > still valid, collection class implementation in libgcj. So it's not
> > logically valid to assume that a bug that only occurs on libgcj is
> > necessarily a bug *in* libgcj.
> 
> This kind of thing happens all the time.  The Java specification can
> be quite loose, and often things will because applications rely on
> unspecified defaults or behaviours that libgcj's (correct, as per the
> spec) implementation does not provide.

One thing that is nice is that our collection classes seem more strict
on concurrent modifications. I have found a couple of programs that
modified list collections while simultaneously iterating over them. The
result of that isn't deterministic, but other implementations just allow
it since they don't have to throw a ConcurrentModificationException, but
we always detect this situation and do throw the exception.

Not that we don't have our own bugs or do things wrong in some other
direction. But in a couple of places our strict reading and checking for
method pre-conditions does help find (latent) bugs in programs.

Cheers,

Mark

BTW. If something doesn't seem to work/compile with the free tool set,
because it depends on com.sun.* classes please take a look at the
following wiki page for some pointers:
http://developer.classpath.org/mediation/ClasspathMigration
(Updates welcome of course!)
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