
The real story behind the Java 7 GA bugs affecting Apache Lucene / Solr - sshah
http://blog.thetaphi.de/2011/07/real-story-behind-java-7-ga-bugs.html
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spullara
I'm actually flabbergasted that neither the Lucene project nor Oracle tested
and found this bug long ago. Java 7 builds have been available for years.
Makes me wonder how many developers tried an early Java 7 build, got this
error and then didn't report it because they assumed someone else was going to
find it and report / fix it.

Update: Earlier report of this bug on June 20th: [http://osdir.com/ml/solr-
user.lucene.apache.org/2011-06/msg0...](http://osdir.com/ml/solr-
user.lucene.apache.org/2011-06/msg01012.html) Another report of AggressiveOpts
crashing PorterStemFilter in Jan: [http://elasticsearch-
users.115913.n3.nabble.com/Java-6u23-an...](http://elasticsearch-
users.115913.n3.nabble.com/Java-6u23-and-ES-0-14-2-crashing-on-
signal-6-SIGABT-td2289578.html)

~~~
gojomo
If you see something, say something!

~~~
SeanLuke
There are serious fifteen year old reported errors in java.util.Random which
have never been fixed and have finally been declared WONTFIX. Ten years ago I
reported that ArrayList's get(), set(), and add() methods were non-inlineable
(!) and could be trivially repaired with a single line of code: this was never
fixed until recent versions of HotSpot which finally obviated the issue.

We're talking core classes here. So I don't have a lot of faith in the bug
reporting process.

~~~
divtxt
The java classes have always had major warts and _no one in charge has ever
seemed to care_.

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.

~~~
smcj
Could you elaborate?

~~~
divtxt
Sorry for the late reply. Not sure which you wanted details on:

\- 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

------
PaulHoule
Isn't it funny how the more glacially slow the pace a language takes, the more
things break when a tiny little change happens?

