Rewriting Java

[turnbull@example.com (Stephen J. Turnbull)]

>>>>> "Nori" == Andrew N Nishigaya <anishi@example.com> writes:

    Nori> Not the most impressive thing in the world, but the
    Nori> fact that we could do it in Java was most impressive.  We
    Nori> had to rewrite portions of Java itself to get it to work
    Nori> right... :-) (seems Sun is a bit uptight about security and

I hope to God that Sun is more than a "little bit uptight" about
security.

    Nori> it breaks complex class loading from remote machines --
    Nori> seems to defeat one of the main attractions of Java --
    Nori> distributed classes.)

I had a long argument with a couple of people about Java.  It scared
me then, it scares me now.  I will use it myself, but not on any
machine that other people depend on.  My correspondents said "but Sun
is really careful about the security, it's the main thing they're
touting."  I've seen the security specs, and they look pretty
difficult to crack.  But people rewriting Java to improve its
performance was the main thing I worried about, because it's exactly
the security features that are the obvious impediments to performance
enhancement.  Did you look carefully at the security implications of
your changes?  Are you sure that you didn't accidentally disable some
of the other security features in the process of weakening the one
that Sun is "excessively paranoid" about?

I don't see anything wrong with doing this in principle, by the way.
I'm very much in favor of people making the system work to their own
specs.  But if such hacked versions become common currency, I can see
lots of not-so-hackerish newbies losing their TurboTax files to
crackers (or the IRS, which is worse :-).  Just as long as you label
your home-brew Java "here be dragons (maybe)".

IMHO, of course.

-- 
                            Stephen J. Turnbull
Institute of Socio-Economic Planning                         Yaseppochi-Gumi
University of Tsukuba                      http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/
Tennodai 1-1-1, Tsukuba, 305 JAPAN                 turnbull@example.com