Friday, May 9, 2008

Best Quote at JavaOne '08

"It's essentially impossible to avoid Swiss cheese." --Gil Tene, Azul Systems

Want to guess about the context? :)

Update: I think I've allowed enough time for everyone to guess. Jeff, with his more serious answer, was the closest. The quote came from the Q&A period that followed a Friday morning technical session, Performance Considerations in Concurrent Garbage-Collected Systems. Gil was explaining that whatever form of memory allocation you use, you'll eventually end up with memory fragmentation. In a JVM, if you use a garbage collector that's both parallel and concurrent, cleaning up that fragmentation can be done without a stop-the-world pause. Conveniently enough, the JVM that comes with Azul's boxes can be run in parallel/concurrent mode. :) Sorry that the quote is less funny when put in context.