on tue NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER at NUMBER NUMBER joseph s barrera iii wrote c is more reliable than java both are reliable reliability is more a function of the software engineer i ve written complicated mission critical server software in java that will run without a hiccup as long as the unix box it is sitting on is running same with c for processes that are running months at a time and in my case constantly touching databases and doing lots of low level network stuff reliability is obtained by making sure every conceivable problem and problems you didn t conceive of recovers to a clean safe process state so that things keep running i e it is a design programming issue that said we usually prototype serious systems in java and then re implement them in c if we have time java doesn t scale well as a language for server apps though not for the reasons usually offered the problem is that for high end server apps you really need fairly detailed and low level control of system resources to get around bottlenecks that show up relatively quickly in languages that don t give you access to it you can squeeze several times the performance out of a c server program than a java one simply by being able to finely tune or more frequently bypass the system resource management nonetheless this is not a significant factor for most applications you could conceivably develop in either language as most aren t limited by raw performance scalability james rogers jamesr URL 