In the latest
ACM Queue magazine there is an interview with the father of Java James Gosling. The interview is generally about virtual machines and the question of .NET comes up. First he says “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” No comment from that one. The other thing that I keep hearing from the Java camp and something that he really railed Microsoft on in the interview was unsafe regions. Why is it that this always keeps comeing up? I have done hundreds of thousands of lines of C# code in the past several years and I have yet to have to use unsafe. But the way Gosling puts it; “you have to drop into the unrestricted pointer environments a lot.” Now I understand that the framework has to interop with the Win32 API, but that doesn't happen at the application level. Average developer may never have to use unsafe code. I really get tired of hearing this, and tobe honest I expected a little more form Gosling, someone that I do have considerable respect for.