December 17, 2018 ❖ Tags: opinion, programming, java, kotlin, android
In the introduction of the previous post I wrote for this series, First Impressions of the Rust Programming Language, I alluded to the presence of arguments that programming language safety should be achieved by moving to languages such as Java which run on a virtual machine. While "safety" may no longer be the first thing that comes to mind in discussion of these languages, especially with the hundreds of vulnerabilities in various implementations of the Java virtual machine, it would be unfair to deny that the principle of running programs in a sandboxed virtual machine is safer than running machine code directly. This post won't be making any claims about safety, though, as I'm more interested in writing about my impressions from a language design perspective. So, how does Java fare in this regard?