jdk7u-jdk VS Taren

Skip lists are relatively simple to make lock-free, while lock-free (even unbalanced) binary search trees are an absolute nightmare.

https://github.com/openjdk-mirror/jdk7u-jdk/blob/master/src/...

Here is the JDK 7 String#hashCode(), which operates on characters: https://github.com/openjdk-mirror/jdk7u-jdk/blob/f4d80957e89....

That's changed in the newer versions, because String has a `byte[]` not a `char[]`, but it was just fine. A hash algorithm can take in bytes, characters, ints, it doesn't matter.

In Java, you don't get access to the bytes that make up a string, to preserve the string's immutability. So for many operations where you might operate on bytes in a lower level language, you end up using characters (unless you're the standard library, and you can finagle access to the bytes), or alternately doing a byte copy of the entire string.

I admit, checksums using characters are a bit weird sounding, but they should also be perfectly well-defined.

"AbstractInterruptibleChannel" seems to be doing this, and the comments/javadocs offer some hint. As to why they're designed this way, that's a good question.

https://github.com/openjdk-mirror/jdk7u-jdk/blob/master/src/...

In Java, you could use BigDecimal. I linked to the source code, because it highlights the amount of complexity you get.

The windows implementation of AWT Desktop just calls the Win32 API ShellExcute function. This then quickly descends into questions such as "what version of windows do you have"; "does it correctly understand the difference between open vs. edit"; what does your registry currently contain"; etc.

ArrayList is a class, it is not an array. It stores two values. An array and its size. You can see this if you read the source code for ArrayList.

The source code for the Java SDK is available on github.