I was reading a question StackOverflow about What is Boost missing? and I was wondering how many of these features are available in Java already and whether making boost more like Java is good idea.

 

Top suggestions

Suggestion	What is in Java
SQL support	JDBC
JSon	Requires an additional library like XStream, Possibly should be in core Java
Audio	Java has basic support. Don't know if it much good.
logging	Logger
callstack, a standard API	Throwable.getStackTrace() and Thread.getStackTrace()
Support for archives	Support ZIP and JAR
Redeveloped collections	The same could be said for Java Collections
Standard XML parsing for UTF-8 text	SAX (event driven) and DOM (Document object model) parsers for XML
Platform independent GUI	Swing
Concurrency with lock free collections and atomic operations	Concurrency library
Arbitrary precision floating point and decimal	BigDecimal and BigInteger
Python, Ruby and Lua support	Not built in, but there is Jython, JRuby and LuaJava
High performance (sub micro-second) timers	System.nanoTime()
Better concept support	This looks like staticly defined duck typing and Java is a long way from having anything like this. ;)
Atomic	AtomicBoolean, AtomicInteger, AtomicLong, AtomicReference, AtomicIntegerArray and AtomicLongArray
Thread pools	ExecutorService and ScheduledExecutorService
RPC	RMI
Character encoding	CharSet
GPU support	I would love Java to have this as well. There is JoCL but its not exactly transparent or close to the Write One, Run Anywhere model.
Hashing/Checksums	MessageDigest and CRC32
OS performance measures	This is poor in Java. You can get the load average but its always 0 on windows.
Co-routines	The closest is fork/join with anonymous classes. In Java 8 methods will become first class objects which is a little closer.
Fixed size strings	You can have this in Java. However I assume the point of this is efficiency, which Java is unlikely to match, ever.
Message Queues	JMS
cryptography	Java SE Security
Extend GC to trigger a GC and handle when an object is cleaned up.	System.gc(), finaliser() and PhantomReferences
A overflow/underflow safe integer	This would be useful if language support was included, but I doubt that will happen, (like unsigned int)
unification and backtracking	This could be added in the far future. I imagine after Java 8
Singletons	An enum with one instance (enum are Objects in Java not int values)
A Persistent Collections Library.	Java doesn't have much support for functional programming. This is something which it could have, but I don't imagine it being any time soon.

IMHO, The best suggestions which are missing or could be better in Java are

 

• persisted collections
• JSon serializaton/deserialization
• GPU support
• Good OS performance measures

Even more useful would be a common interface and basic support for collections which are distributed and persisted. e.g. standardised/simplified Hazelcast, Terracotta and Hibernate. @Vyadh points out this is not what is meant by a persisted collection in functional programming

 

Last thoughts

While I really like Java, but I have never looked at C++ & Boost and thought; if only it were more like Java. (Some of the limitations of the C syntax are a bit backward IMHO) I have thought this about the refactoring tools in IDEs e.g extracting a method from a body of code (and have it replace any duplicates)

Is making C++ & Boost more like the relatively heavy weight Java a good thing? Or is it better to use a language for it strengths?

 

From http://vanillajava.blogspot.com/2011/09/is-making-boost-more-like-java-good.html