Why was Cassandra written in Java? [closed]

Answer 1

The performance penalty for modern Java runtimes is not that big and programming in Java is less error-prone than in c.

Answer 2

Why the hell on earth would anybody write a database ENGINE in JAVA ?

Platform independance is a pretty big factor for servers, because you have a lot more hardware and OS heterogenity than with desktop PCs. Another is security. Not having to worry about buffer overflows means most of the worst kind of security holes are simply impossible.

I was under the impression that there's nothing faster than C/C++, and that a database engine shouldn't be any slower than max speed, and certainly not use garbage collection...

Your impression is incorrect. C/C++ is not necessarily faster than Java, and modern garbage collectors have a big part in that because they enable object creation to be incredibly fast.

Answer 3

Don't forget that Java VMs make use of a just-in-time (JIT) engine that perform on-the-fly optimisations to make Java comparable to C++ in terms of speed. Bearing in mind that Java is quite a productive language (despite its naysayers) and portable, together with the JIT optimisation capability, means that Java isn't an unreasonable choice for something like this.

Answer 4

I can see a few reasons:

• Security: it's easier to write secure software in Java than in C++ (remember the buffer overflows?)
• Performance: it's not THAT worse. It's definitely worse at startup, but once the code is up and running, it's not a big thing. Actually, you have to remember an important point here: Java code is continually optimized by the VM, so in some circumstances, it gets faster than C++

Answer 5

What do you mean, C++? Hand coded assembly would be faster if you have a few decades to spare.