I have been a java programmer since 1997 and used IBM Java 1.3 for OS/2 with good success. It is hard to crash. On the other hand the current Java 1.6 is easy to crash and even bring down the whole system. All you need to do is fill up memory with a series of threads holding vectors. There is no warning to the doom. I found this because I had some bad code which would store arrays in vectors with cross pointers to the arrays so the vectors would not actually leave memory after closing the thread holding the vector. (a nasty memory leak) On other systems (not OS/2) the results were an eventual hang of java. On OS/2 the results were a crash of Java and sometimes a crash of the system. At least now I have a test bed for leaks.