.NET – Hitesh Sarda

Multi-threaded Java practitioners know about the indispensible ways to taking thread dumps to see a snapshot of what’s happening in the JVM, and resolve ‘hang’ issues. There are plethora of options, ranging from simple command line tools and utilities to nice GUI applications to writing some code in your application. A sampling of such options:

Stack trace in Java

Command Line

If the application is running as a console application, you can try one of these:

Sending a signal to the Java Virtual Machine

On UNIX platforms you can send a signal to a program by using the kill command. This is the quit signal, which is handled by the JVM. For example, on Solaris you can use the command kill -QUIT process_id, where process_id is the process number of your Java program.

It is becoming more and more obvious that there are just two runtimes left to execute code, the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI). So, I decided to see how they stack up. Looks like both environments have something for everyone.

Here is a list of programming languages available on these runtimes.

Can run on CLI using IKVM.NET
Can run on JVM using Mainsoft solution
Not yet usable
Can run on CLR, but is behind the JVM implementation

The main reason for the research was to identify a new language I should pick-up. I looked at Python and Ruby, but both have some sore thumbs that I just can’t stand. I really liked Boo and Groovy; they are similar to C#/Java in syntax and incorporate the good things from Python. Although I like Boo’s syntax and approach more than Groovy, Groovy has a more mature implementation and ecosystem. I will try to use Groovy for some hobby project and get a feel to things.