Isn't it the cost of having direct access to the memory? Can you name another language where you can control so many aspects of the system, and still remain "clean"?
Well, I guess I should have waited for this discussion to reach a conclusion :) I read in Advanced Linux Programming (the famous ALP book) that fork() as well as creating threads via pthread library use clone() in the background. Any ways, the discussion here is quite informative!
Here is what James Gosling had to say about one of the patents Oracle alleged Google infringed:
Oracle finally filed a patent lawsuit against Google. Not a big surprise. During the integration meetings between Sun and Oracle where we were being grilled about the patent situation between Sun and Google, we could see the Oracle lawyer’s eyes sparkle. Filing patent suits was never in Sun’s genetic code. Alas….
I hope to avoid getting dragged into the fray: they only picked one of my patents (RE38,104) to sue over.
Your views may differ. But I would take the statement "not developed by Google" as "not born at Google." I would compare that to SQL Server which wasn't born at Microsoft amongst a lot of other things.
Also, the fact that Android is not Linux means that you can't take a Linux app and port it to Android...it won't work...amongst other things there is no glibc; there is no windowing system; etc.
Do you think any of the "facts" mentioned on the page are drawbacks for Android? Let's recap: forked Linux, competing with Java ME within Java eco-system and having a non-JVM virtual machine to run the programs.
Yes, that's exactly why I think the "operations" concept was added. But isn't it good to provide extra sem_wait() and sem_post() for most of the rest of us who want a single increment or a decrement? I have yet to find a good use of an array of operations in a single atomic fashion. Neither dining philosophers nor reader-writers need multiple increments/ decrements in one go.