This note’s for you

Some days ago I digged out, what turned to be a long-standing (JDK1.3 days) bug in the JNI specification
. Apparently, it still isn’t fixed. The issue in question is, should GetStringChars() return a zero-terminated string or not? The specification is silent about this, so a sane application developer MUST assume, it is not. A JVM developer is relatively free to return either a zero-terminated jchar array (like Hotspot does, but AFAICS, not always either), or not-zero-terminated jchar array (like a couple of VMs apparently do, like Jamaica, and I think gcj and jamvm too). It is a shame that this issue never has been fixed.

I posted to core-libs-dev@openjdk.java.net about this, and started an interesting little thread. The most hilarious response so far has been:

The developers at Sun found the correct way to interpreting the specification; the other ones followed it blindfolded. It is now time to repent.

Let me also quote Mark from IRC:

I guess it is a special kind of developers who can correctly interpret specs and Sun got them all

Unfortunately, fixing this on the side of Jamaica would mean relatively drastic changes to the internal string representation OR a very inefficient GetStringChars(). Bah.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 25th, 2008 at 5:12 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.