[asterisk-dev] "Digium development team" - not Asterisk dev team - Java

[Nick Lewis]

>java is great for cross platform code, but is inherently not a 
>real time language. you can't even control garbage collection 
>yourself so the interpreter could pick the worst possible time 
>to do it. application maybe, channel asking for trouble.

I don't think we should get too hung up on the real-time nature of
asterisk. A typical example of the real-time aspects is that rtp packets
need to go out every 20ms with less than say 10% jitter. With modern
processors handling billions of lines of machine code a second this is
not a very onerous real time requirement. Furthermore asterisk runs on
non real-time operating systems what can switch away from asterisk tasks
at any inopportune moment so it is unlikely that a bit of gargage
collection is going to be significant.

I am not convinced that using java for channels is asking for trouble.
These predominantly deal with signalling rather than media and
signalling protocols are very resistant to delays with timeouts
typically measured in seconds.

I think there are two types of developer in open source - firstly, those
that want to develop code to do cool things, to contribute, to improve
their skills and to gain kudos and secondly those that have to develop
code to maintain their business. Only the latter will bother with c. The
bright young things in the former category are put off by it.

Let me draw a historical comparison. In a former generation the bright
young things were put off by 8051 assembler even though many realtime
applications were written in it at that time. They lazily wanted instead
to use c and to offload task switching to an operating system. The
hardware soon became capable and cheap enough to make this possible. The
same has now happened to java.

-- N_L

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