hashmash
Joined 8 years ago
Joined 8 years ago
It should also be noted that the low pause Azul C4 collector was available in 2010, but it was a commercial product.
Most of the later problems are due to the fact that the API attack surface was too large, because of the backwards SecurityManager design. And because it existed, it seems there was little incentive to do something better.
Once the instrumentation API was introduced (Java 5), it made it easier to write agents which could limit access to APIs using an "allow" approach rather than the awful rules imposed by the SecurityManager. Java 9 introduced modules, further hardening the boundaries between trusted and untrusted code. It was at this point the SecurityManager should have been officially deprecated, instead of waiting four more years.
Going back to the earlier comment, the problem isn't due to the runtime being somehow inherently insecure, but instead due to the defective design of the SecurityManager. It hasn't been necessary for providing security for many years.
The key reason why applet security failed was because it gave you the entire JDK by default, and so every method in the JDK needed to have explicit security checking code in place to restrict access. The model was backwards -- full control by default with selective disabling meant that every new feature in the JDK is a new vulnerability.
When trying to adapt a long to an int, the usual pattern is to overload the necessary methods to work with longs. Following the same pattern for uint/int conversions, the safe option is to work with longs, since it eliminates the possibility of having any conversion errors.
Now if we're taking about signed and unsigned 64-bit values, there's no 128-bit value to upgrade to. Personally, I've never had this issue considering that 63 bits of integer precision is massive. Unsigned longs don't seem that critical.
Having more type conversion headaches is a worse problem than having to use `& 0xff` masks when doing less-common, low-level operations.
The release of HotSpot was in 1999, and became default with JDK 1.3 in 2000. It took JIT compilation to the next level, making tools like GCJ mostly obsolete.
So for most people, the initial impression of modules is negative, and then they just decided to rule the feature out completely. This has created a sea of useless criticism, and any constructive criticism is hardly observed. Improvements to module configuration (combine it with the classpath), would go a long way towards making modules "just work" without the naysayers getting in the way.