The real story behind the Java 7 GA bugs affecting Apache Lucene / Solr(blog.thetaphi.de) |
The real story behind the Java 7 GA bugs affecting Apache Lucene / Solr(blog.thetaphi.de) |
Update: Earlier report of this bug on June 20th: http://osdir.com/ml/solr-user.lucene.apache.org/2011-06/msg0... Another report of AggressiveOpts crashing PorterStemFilter in Jan: http://elasticsearch-users.115913.n3.nabble.com/Java-6u23-an...
We're talking core classes here. So I don't have a lot of faith in the bug reporting process.
My personal bugbear: java.lang.Object depends on hundreds of classes including, among other absurdities, the Turkish locale (IIRC). This was about 13 years ago. Of course, the bug was eventually marked WONTFIX.
14 years ago, I adopted Java because it was a beautiful escape from the warty giant that C++ was becoming. Sun sat on it's laurels and, like many others, I moved on to Python.
Now Java is the new C++: unpleasant and to be avoided when possible.
- java issues / sun not caring - there are examples above by SeanLuke, gojomo and myself
- java.lang.Object depends on hundreds of classes - violates basic design principles of modularity and avoiding cyclic dependencies
- "Sun sat on it's laurels..." - apart from ignoring existing issues, they also ignored requests for language enhancements (e.g. dynamic language support, covariance, etc) for a long time causing many developers to give up on java for web development and move to python & ruby
I liked how minor-update 6u23 finally 'fixed' a ~10-year old bug in GZIP member handling, in a manner that significantly changed behavior (breaking workarounds for the prior bug), and introduced new bugs in GZIP header handling. (I'd supply the bug number, but their bug database is in another one of its many-minute lulls where login and search are impossible.)
My favorite popular, decade-languishing feature request is this one for verbatim multi-line string literals:
http://bugs.sun.com/view_bug.do?bug_id=4472509
This 'syntactic sugar' casually dismissed by Mr. xxxxx@xxxxx could by now have saved thousands (maybe tens of thousands) of hours of developer time, futzing with concatenation and escaping and related bugs.
String.substring() leaks memory