Matthias Ernst's Weblog

Mustang Contributions

I've made two contributions to Mustang. A small fix for a TrAX bug and a "jumbo" patch to replace the native implementation of File#deleteOnExit. The second issue once cost me a lot of time to track down - I didn't want anyone else to fall into that trap again. It actually tackles a number of bug reports. The first one is "fix in progress" now and the second one is coming along well, too. You can track your submissions here. I really like the idea, however I wonder how cost-efficient that process is. It takes a lot of work to review and integrate patches if you want to maintain a certain level of quality and I get the impression that some Sun engineers are very careful people.

Multi-Core CPUs and the concurrency hype

Lately, there's been a lot of buzz about how multi-core CPU's will change the face of the software world. Programmers would be facing a new challenge: to write concurrent software, otherwise the software won't perform. I'm surprised about the level of attention. I think this is rather old news. Multiprocessors have been around for a long time; we've been paying attention to actually using the available CPUs for a long time. And our customers are doing the same - they complain if we don't.