API考古学之“C风格的Java API”

By pongba
 
 
#从fishbowl上看到的，非常幽默：
Occasionally in Java, you come across an API that makes you sit up and go “What were they thinking?” Take, for example, the code to list all the threads in the current ThreadGroup. Rather than having the obvious method: i.e. one that returns a list (or array) of threads, the signature looks like this:

int enumerate(Thread[] list)

You pass an empty array to the method, which will be filled with

Thread

objects. The method then returns the number of threads it placed in the array. If the array is not long enough to accept all the threads, the overflow will be silently discarded.
To initialise the array, you must rely on

ThreadGroup#activeCount

, which only returns an approximation of the number of threads that

enumerate

might return.
If you’re looking to avoid memory leaks in a non-garbage-collected environment, then it makes perfect sense for an API to push responsibility for memory management back up its caller, and to gracefully handle whichever buffer-size it’s given to fill. When you’ve got pervasive GC, it just looks (and is) clumsy.
So the obvious answer to “What were they thinking?”, of course, is “They were thinking like C programmers”.
Which in turn leads one to suspect that this particular API has been around since before Java was called Java.
The Fishbowl: Charles Miller's Weblog
#另一方面，这个例子完美体现了GC语言的优势。