So, are you using RogueWave? STL? You get the idea. There is plenty new to learn.

Thanks, that was a cogent answer.

That was actually me quoting Stroustrup.

I feel that you were trying to be insulting.

To restate my question, why are you developing your apps on a different os than you are deploying?

That is an interesting perspective. Thanks for explaining it.

Actually,

if (conditionImLookingForIsFound())
      doFoundThing();
else
      doOtherThing();

is most readable. Keep all the code in view at the same level of abstraction.

Why not put the cleanup code in a well named function instead? Also, there are plenty of experienced C programmers who loathe gotos.

That I understand. Modern gc algorithms are pretty good, though.

That I don't understand. First, one can't possibly know for sure when an object is freeable. Moreover, how could one even say "free up this object"? If you can even say that, then you'd have a pointer to it, giving it a positive reference count! But, secondly, and this is really my question, why should one care? Even if an object is marked for deletion, that memory won't be made available until the VM is good and ready. (When swept.) So, what's the advantage?

By analogy, when I save a file to disk, I don't care what sectors it's written to. The dos worries about that for me, so that I can get on with writing software that addresses the business problem at hand.

I also disagree with the claims that Scala is too complex. But I'm happy that the undiligent think it is.

Scala already is Java 9. Java the JVM remains relevant, but Java the language is no longer interesting.

Oh, I hear that. The stories we could tell over beers!

But even when using Java's "native mechanism", things like filename case sensitivity can still bite you. And here's another example. When I start a Java thread, does that run in the same OS process or not? And if the answer is "that depends", then that has some serious implications for availability, testing, and even security.

Stroustrup famously quipped that Java is not platform independent -- it's a platform.

Sure. If I'm writing an email client or something. But if I'm composing a complex system, then there are performance and functional characteristics that vary, and these could very well make or break the product. I appreciate the desire to defer architectural decisions to the last responsible moment. But picking the OS can drive so many other design decisions, that one should get that right almost from the beginning.

With Java predominantly on the server side instead of in the browser, what exactly is the use case that WORA is supposed to solve? Or put another way, who is writing cross-platform apps?

I find that a little scary.

But I'm curious. Do you do that because as a developer you find Windows more productive for you?

We used to joke "write once run away".

Why do you care when the object gets freed?

I have no industrial experience with phone software, so I can't speak to that. But the research surely delivered for software in the large. In the same way that compilers can no longer optimize code as well as virtual machines can, it's a bit conceited to think we could hand-code memory management of complex systems better than the computer itself.

Also, in addition to app performance, the second metric to consider is programmer productivity, and gc's impact there is incalculable.