the corner office

IBM's 1.5 64 bit JDK was promising, and a bit faster than Sun's 1.5 JDK (but not as fast as IBM's 1.4 JDK), but stability... not so good. Today was my first attempt at debugging something, and Eclipse's little blue breakpoint dot turned out to be Kryptonite for the poor JVM, causing it to segfault; a term which doesn't quite do the experience justice - a more apt description would be that the JVM soiled itself enthusiastically and then fell over dead.

This isn't the first weirdness I've had, actually. With IBM's 1.4 JDK if you tried to step into a switch statement during a debugging session, the app would die. You'd expect an IBM-spawned IDE like Eclipse and an IBM JDK to get along better.

I'm back to Sun's 1.5 JDK, which is also guilty of the occasional weird crash, but allows me to do what I need to do, albeit a bit sluggishly. I'm not sure whether to admit defeat and stick with this, or try out the 32 bit JVMs.