Java performance isn't the fastest, that's ok, a close 3rd place behind C/CPP ain't bad. And you're still ahead of Go, and 10x or more ahead of Python and Ruby.
Java syntax isn't perfect, but it is consistent, and predictable. And hey, if you're using an Idea or Eclipse (and not notepad, atom, etc), it's just pressing control-space all day and you're fine.
Java memory management seems weird from a Unix Philosophy POV, till you understand whats happening. Again, not perfect, but a good tradeoff.
What do you get for all of these tradeoffs? Speed, memory safety. But with that you still still have dynamic invocation capabilities (making things like interception possible) and hotswap/live redefinition (things that C/CPP cannot do).
Perfect? No, but very practical for the real world use case.
> And hey, if you're using an Idea or Eclipse (and not notepad, atom, etc),
Java's tools are really top notch. Using IntelliJ for Java feels a whole new different world from using IDEs for other languages.
Speaking of Go, does anyone know why Go community is not hot on developing containers for concurrent data structures? I see Mutex this and lock that scattering in Go code, while in Java community the #1 advice on writing concurrency code is to use Java's amazing containers. Sometimes, I do miss the java.util.concurrent and JCTools.
I'll offer a counterpoint to the responses. Until go got generics, concurrent data structures were awkward. The stdlib now does include things like sync.Map.
In fact my experience has been that overuse of channels is a code smell that alot of new go developers fall into and later regret. There's a reason the log package uses a mutex for synchronization.
In general I think channels are great for connecting a few large chunks of your program together. Concurrency is great but also not every function call benefits from being turned into a distributed system.
I think that it would be a great idea to develop more concurrent go data structures with generics and I suspect inertia is what's keeping the community from doing it.
My credentials such as the are: been writing go since 1.0. worked at Google and taught go classes as well as owned some of the original go services (the downloads server aka payload server).
Don't communicate by sharing memory; share memory by communicating.
The overuse of Mutex and Lock are from developers bringing along patterns from other language where they are used to communicating via shared memory. So this aspect of the language just doesn't click as well for many people at first. How long it takes you to get it depends on your experience.
My experience is a shocking amount of the golang community believe channels are a performance problem for whatever they're doing, and they use mutexes in some misguided effort at optimization.
But then I have also encountered Rust people that will look down on Java but had no idea buffered I/O had higher throughput than unbuffered.
Thanks! What about data structure shared by multiple goroutines? Say, an in-memory cache object? Or do we always have multiple goroutines talk to a dedicated goroutine for the shared value? Would the performance be okay for all use cases? A reason that people use JCTools is that it can easily support hundreds of millions of concurrent reads/writes to its data structures on a 10-year old laptop.
For things like cache I generally have 2 goroutines communicating with it. One that directs reads and one that directs writes. Using CSP style you can pass the data (by value) through to the cache (or any other CSP style process) without copying and it performs quite well. I've written several high performance systems in this way with great results.
The only replacement for locks/mutexes is a lock free data structure. Locks are not what make concurrency possible, they are what makes it data-safe.
You can use platform threads, user-space threads, language-provided "green" threads, goroutines, continuations or whatever you wish for concurrency management, but that's almost orthogonal to data safety.
When I got out of college and was still firmly in the "Java is the solution to everything" mentality I didn't realize that my admiration was really for the JVM and the Java App Server tooling that was so much more advanced than anything else at the time. It was basically Docker + K8s for anything running on the JVM more than 2 decades earlier.
Java the language eventually drove me away because the productivity was so poor until it started improving around 2006-2007.
Now I keep an eye on it for other languages that run on the JVM: JRuby, Clojure, Scala, Groovy, Kotlin, etc.
IMO JRuby is the most interesting since you gain access to 2 very mature ecosystems by using it. When Java introduced Project Loom and made it possible to use Ruby's Fibers on the JVM via Virtual Threads it was a win for both.
Charles Nutter really doesn't get anywhere close to enough credit for his work there.
You can take pretty much any code written for Java 1.0 and you can still build and run it on Java 24. There are exceptions (sun.misc.Unsafe usage, for example) but they are few and far between. Moreso than nearly any other language backwards compatibility has been key to java. Heck, there's a pretty good chance you can take a jar compiled for 1.0 and still use it to this day without recompiling it.
Both Ruby and Python, with pedigrees nearly as old as Java's, have made changes to their languages which make things look better, but ultimately break things. Heck, C++ tends to have so many undefined quirks and common compiler extensions that it's not uncommon to see code that only compiles with specific C++ compilers.
I have C++ code from 1997 that I occasionally compile. So far it runs. 10 yeas ago compiling with -Wall exposed an inconsequential bug and that was it. I suspect when it stops to compile it will be from an absence of a particular X11 library that I used to parse a config in otherwise command-line utility.
Which also points to another thing where Java compatibility shines. One can have a GUI application that is from nineties and it still runs. It can be very ugly especially on a high DPI screen, but still one can use it.
Yeah, that and the portability are really incredible and underrated. It is funny, because I constantly hear things like "write once, debug everywhere", but I have yet to see an alternative that has a higher probability of working everywhere.
Although Python is pretty close, if you exclude Windows (and don't we all want to do that?).
I can run basically any Perl code back to Perl 4 (March 1991) on Perl 5.40.2 which is current. I can run the same code on DOS, BeOS, Amiga, Atari ST, any of the BSDs, Linux distros, macOS, OS X, Windows, HP/UX, SunOS, Solaris, IRIX, OSF/1, Tru64, z/OS, Android, classic Mac, and more.
This takes nothing away from Java and the Java ecosystem though. The JVM allows around the same number of target systems to run not one language but dozens. There’s JRuby, Jython, Clojure, Scala, Kotlin, jgo, multiple COBOL compilers that target JVM, Armed Bear Common Lisp, Eta, Sulong, Oxygene (Object Pascal IIRC), Rakudo (the main compiler for Perl’s sister language Raku) can target JVM, JPHP, Renjin (R), multiple implementations of Scheme, Yeti, Open Source Simula, Redline (Smalltalk), Ballerina, Fantom, Haxe (which targets multiple VM backends), Ceylon, and more.
Perl has a way to inline other languages, but is only really targeted by Perl and by a really ancient version of PHP. The JVM is a bona fide target for so many. Even LLVM intermediate code has a tool to target the JVM, so basically any language with an LLVM frontend. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a PCode to JVM tool somewhere.
JavaScript has a few languages targeting it. WebAssembly has a bunch and growing, including C, Rust, and Go. That’s probably the closest thing to the JVM.
> I can run basically any Perl code back to Perl 4 (March 1991) on Perl 5.40.2 which is current.
Yes, but can you _read_ it?
I'm only half joking. Perl has so many ways to do things, many of them obscure but preferable for specific cases. It's often a write-only language if you can't get ahold of the dev who wrote whatever script you're trying to debug.
I wonder if modern LLMs could actually help with that.
> I can run THE SAME CODE on DOS, BeOS, Amiga, Atari ST, any of the BSDs, Linux distros, macOS, OS X, Windows, HP/UX, SunOS, Solaris, IRIX, OSF/1, Tru64, z/OS, Android, classic Mac, and more.
No, you really can't. Not anything significant anyway. There are too many deviations between some of those systems to all you to run the same code.
I wonder what other languages run on the JVM. What about Perl, Icon, SNOBOL, Prolog, Forth, Rexx, Nim, MUMPS, Haskell, OCaml, Ada, Rust, BASIC, Rebol, Haxe, Red, etc.?
Partly facetious question, because I think there are some limitations in some cases that prevent it (not sure, but a language being too closely tied to Unix or hardware could be why), but also serious. Since the JVM platform has all that power and performance, some of these languages could benefit from that, I'm guessing.
I often run into problems running Python code under Linux.
I don’t know if it is a me problem or if I’m missing the right incantations to set up the environment or whatever. Never had that much problems with Java.
But I’m a Java and Ruby person so it might really be missing knowledge.
It's not you. Python packaging has regressed into a worse mess than it was 20 years ago. I limit myself to simple scripts that only rely on builtins. Anything more complicated goes to a more dependable language.
I rarely run into issues when using Poetry. If you use pip, add packages to requirements.txt willy-nilly and don't pin versions then you are asking for trouble.
UV. Using it as the exec target for python (UV script) is great. Dependencies declared at the top, now I have executable files in something better than bash.
I no longer shy away from writing <500 LOC utility/glue scripts in python thanks to uv.
I don't know about the difference between 20 years ago versus now, but it's certainly doesn't seem to be clear now.
e.g. poetry, venv and pyenv have been mentioned in just the next few comments below yours. and this is just one example. i have seen other such seeming confusion and different statements by different people about what package management approach to use for python.
For anything more than just a one off script, look into venv. I’ve not written any python until this past year and can’t imagine maintaining an ongoing project without it.
Prior to that I would frequently have issues (and still have issues with one-off random scripts that use system python).
As late as 2022, I was at a company still in the middle of "migrating" from 2 to 3. I wouldn't be surprised if the migration project was still going on. The system had gone beyond tech debt and was bordering on bankruptcy.
Python 3 came out in 2008. If the 2 vs 3 differences are still biting you you probably have bigger problems to solve (deprecated, insecure, unmaintained dependencies for example).
Honestly, it isn't just you. I had to hold off on 3.13 for quite a while too, because of various package conflicts. It isn't terrible, especially thanks to things like pyenv, but it is far from perfect.
I just spent 30 minutes trying to get a python package running on my Mac... Not feeling that. Pythons version compatibility is just awful and the mix of native is deeply problematic. Don't get me started on tooling and observability.
I know that what you said is supposed to be true. However in my real world experience it is anything but. Cisco java programs are a disaster and require certain JVMs to run.
The enterprise Java applications we use require specific versions of specific Linux distros. It's possible that they would run on other distros, or even other operating systems, if you got the right JVM. But there's enough question about it that the companies that sell them for a substantial price aren't willing to promise even a little portability.
It always made me wonder why I hear about companies who are running very old versions of Java though. It always seemed like backwards compatibility would make keeping up to date with the latest an almost automatic thing.
That's not the virtues of Java the language. That's the virtues of Java the backward-compatible platform. That is, you didn't say anything about the language (syntax and semantics), you only talked about backward compatibility.
(It's still a valid point. It's just not the point you labeled it as.)
I have the exact opposite experience. I haven't coded much Java, but when I tried to revisit it, code I wrote 10 or 20 years ago doesn't even remotely compile anymore.
While with C++, 20 years later you may need to add a missing #include (that you were always supposed to have), but then it just works as it always has.
Java is, in my opinion, a complete mess. And I think it's weird how anybody could like it past the 1990s.
C++ not being compilable later hasn't been true since pre standard C++. We're talking 1980s now.
Entity Beans were terrible, representing the height of JEE over complexity. I remember editing at least 3 classes, a couple interfaces, and some horrific XML deployment descriptors to represent an "entity." A lot of the tooling was proprietary to the specific app server. On top of that, it was slow.
In the early 2000's, I used to work on JEE stuff for my day job, then go home and build PHP-based web apps. PHP was at least 10x more productive.
The worst thing about EntityBeans is they were so bad they made Hibernate look good, which led people to think it was good. After 10 years of hammering against ORM complexity I finally switched to using thin database wrapper layers and have not once ever regretted it.
Hibernate... a real PITA every time the application needed something beyond basic single-table CRUD queries; sadly for me it happened 99% of the times.
After some months of torture, plain JDBC with their stupid checked exceptions was refreshing, even without wrappers.
You have to keep in mind that entity beans were developed in a time before generics, annotations, and widespread use of byte code enhancement that made a lot of the easy, magical stuff we take for granted possible.
I remember. During the same time period, I wrote some Java apps that used plain old JDBC, plus some of my own helper functions for data mapping. They were lighter weight and higher performance compared to the "enterprise" Java solutions. Unfortunately they weren't buzzword compliant though.
> I personally don’t care for Java, but I have bills so it’s always in my back pocket. Things happen , sometimes you need to write Java to eat.
I write Java to pay bills and my eyes and fingers thank me everyday for sparing them from a sea of if err != nil. I won't even go(!) into the iota stupidly compared to Java's enums.
> Java syntax isn't perfect, but it is consistent, and predictable
This is something I greatly value with the recent changes to Java. They found a great way to include sealed classes, switch expression, project Loom, records that feels at home in the existing Java syntax.
The tooling with heap dump analyzers, thread dump analyzers, GC analyzers is also top notch.
I think Gavin Bierman is an unsung hero as far as steering the Java language is concerned. I had the privilege to sit next to him in the office when I was working on TruffleRuby, and our conversations on language design were always elucidating, and his ability to gently steer others away from pitfalls was something I wish I could do as well.
Hearing the work he and others did to gradually introduce pattern matching without painting themselves into a corner was fascinating and inspiring.
> Java performance isn't the fastest, that's ok, a close 3rd place behind C/CPP ain't bad.
When Java got popular, around 1999-2001, it was not a close third behind C (or C++).
At that time, on those machines, the gap between programs written in C and programs written in Java was about the same as the gap right now between programs written in Java and programs written in pure Python.
Third best consistently used over 3 decades adds up to a great, great deal. Although, to be fair, a great deal has been invested in cutting edge GCs for the JVM – some fresh out of research.
And, alongside C# for historical reasons, the closest we got in mainstream to the whole Xerox PARC ideals of what a developer workstation is supposed to be like.
The language has/had some rough edges that have been improved over the years, but the developer experience of using a strongly-typed, object-oriented language within a sturdy IDE like Idea is just second to none. The debugging process is so very straightforward. Java became synonymous with enterprisey bloated systems for good reason, but there is no pile of mud Java system that can't be stepped through cleanly with a debugger.
I'd also throw in what was possibly their greatest idea that sped adoption and that's javadoc. I'm not sure it was a 100% original idea, but having inline docs baked into the compiler and generating HTML documentation automatically was a real godsend for building libraries and making them usable very quickly. Strong typing also lined up nicely with making the documents hyper-linkable.
Java was really made to solve problems for large engineering teams moreso than a single developer at a keyboard.
Indeed. Many languages have something similar to Javadoc, yet somehow I haven't encountered anything quite as good as Javadoc, and I can't explain why or exactly how it's better. I admit I haven't tried that hard either. But I suspect it's down to the nature of the language and how, with well designed libraries at least (and not all are, certainly,) there is a nice decomposition of modules, packages, classes/interfaces and methods that leads to everything somehow having a correct place, and the Javadoc just follows. The strong typing is another contributor, where 90% of the time you can just look and the signature and imply what is intended. Finally, the old-fashioned frames based HTML typically used with Javadoc is a great benefit.
Also, I've found I experience less reluctance to author Javadoc for some reason. Again, part of this is due to strong types, and much of the legwork being correctly generated in nearly every case.
Lombok, when used with moderation, is wonderful. Mockito is magic, of a good kind. Maven still gets it done for me; I've yet to care about any problems Gradle purports to solve, and I think that's down to not creating the problems that Gradle is designed to paper over in the first place.
Today, if I had my choice of one thing I'd like to see in Java that doesn't presently exist it's Python's "yield". Yes, there are several ways to achieve this in Java. I want the totally frictionless generators of Python in Java.
I find these discussions have an interior split between the folks who are more concerned with getting the feature out now versus the folks who have had to keep a thousand ancient features running.
True, but it's also true that code spends 99% of it's lifetime in maintenance. That's the reason I am never impressed by tools that make it fast and easy to bootstrap.
> Java performance isn't the fastest, that's ok, a close 3rd place behind C/CPP ain't bad. And you're still ahead of Go, and 10x or more ahead of Python and Ruby.
I’m slightly surprised there isn’t more KVM/Virtualized bare metal JVM environments. While I haven’t used it in a while, the decade+ I spent running Javan’s in production basically have the entire system over to the JVM (with some overhead for some small non-JVM background daemons). Most things were built not to use POSIX standards, but Java equivalents. Occasionally direct file system access for writes was necessary (logging being a big exception).
So giving the entire system to the JVM, performing some warmup prior to a service considering itself “healthy”, and the JVM was reasonably fast. It devoured memory and you couldn’t really do anything else with the host, but you got the Java ecosystem, for better or worse).
There was a lot of good tooling that is missing from other platforms, but also a ton of overhead that I am happy to not have to deal with at the moment.
Having a hard time finding it now, but someone put together a benchmark with two categories - naive and optimized - comparing implementations across languages with a workload vaguely resembling a real-world business application server with a mix of long and short lived objects. Java was at the top of the naive benchmark by a landslide and behind C and C++ (edit: and probably Rust) for the optimized ranking, but with a gap before the rest of the field.
With the JVM you basically outsource all the work you need to do in C/C++ to optimize memory management and a typical developer is going to have a hell of a time beating it for non-trivial, heterogenous workloads. The main disadvantage (at least as I understand) is the memory overhead that Java objects incur which prevent it from being fully optimized the way you can with C/C++.
> Java memory management seems weird from a Unix Philosophy POV, till you understand whats happening. Again, not perfect, but a good tradeoff.
The GC story is just great, however. Pretty much the best you can get in the entire ecosystem of managed-memory languages.
You have different GC algorithms implemented, and you can pick and tune the one that best fits your use-case.
The elephant in the room is of course ZGC, which has been delivering great improvements in lowering the Stop-the-world GC pauses. I've seen it consistently deliver sub-millisecond pauses whereas other algorithms would usually do 40-60 msec.
Needless to say, you can also write GC-free code, if you need that. It's not really advertised, but it's feasible.
> The elephant in the room is of course ZGC, which has been delivering great improvements in lowering the Stop-the-world GC pauses. I've seen it consistently deliver sub-millisecond pauses whereas other algorithms would usually do 40-60 msec.
As someone who's always been interested in gamedev, I genuinely wonder whether that would be good enough to implement cutting-edge combo modern acceleration structures/streaming systems (e.g. UE5's Nanite level-of-detail system.)
I have the ability to understand these modern systems abstractly, and I have the ability to write some high-intensity nearly stutter-free gamedev code that balances memory collection and allocation for predicable latency, but not both, at least without mistakes.
> As someone who's always been interested in gamedev, I genuinely wonder whether that would be good enough to implement cutting-edge combo modern acceleration structures/streaming systems (e.g. UE5's Nanite level-of-detail system.)
The GC would be the least of your problems.
Java is neat, but the memory model (on which the GC relies) and lack of operator overloading does mean that for games going for that level of performance would be incredibly tedious. You also have the warm up time, and the various hacks to get around that which exist.
Back when J2ME was a thing there was a mini industry of people cranking out games with no object allocation, everything in primitive arrays and so on. I knew of several studios with C and even C++ to Java translators because it was easier to write such code in a subset of those and automatically translate and optimize than it was to write the Java of the same thing by hand.
I'm honestly amazed people say this about Java, because the language almost couldn't be worse at giving you tools to use memory efficiently.
There's no value types (outside primitives) and everything is about pointer chasing. And surely if there was less pointer chasing it'd be easier to do the GC work at the same time.
When people talk about GC performance they’re not talking about using memory efficiently. They’re talking about how fast the GC can allocate and how long it will stop the world when it needs to collect. In both of these areas you won’t find GCs better than the ones provided by HotSpot. Even with what you mention, pointer chasing and lack of structs, they still outperform other implementations.
> Needless to say, you can also write GC-free code, if you need that. It's not really advertised, but it's feasible.
It is not feasible under the JVM type system. Even once Valhalla gets released it will carry restrictions that will keep that highly impractical.
It's much less needed with ZGC but even the poster child C# from the GC-based language family when it comes to writing allocation-free and zero-cost abstraction code presents challenges the second you need to use code written by someone who does not care as much about performance.
Zero-allocation (obviously different from zero GC) frameworks made a bit of a splash a little while back, but I'm not seeing much about them anymore from a brief search. I would have sworn that quarkus was one of them, but it looks like that's definitely not the case anymore.
The downside is that you sacrifice a lot of the benefits of guard rails of the language and tooling for what may not end up being much savings, depending on your workload.
I'm still trying to mentally grok the Clojure model and syntax hah. On my todo list. Clojure users seem to love it though. Do you have a tutorial that could sell it to me?
My Clojure AI book won't teach you the language, but afterward you read through a tutorial my book contains interesting examples; read it online https://leanpub.com/clojureai/read
For syntax, maybe this general Lisp advice will help: consider a normal function call, like f(a, b). To make this into a Lisp function call, drop the unnecessary comma (whitespace is enough to separate tokens) like f(a b), and then move the function name inside the parentheses, like (f a b). Applying operators that are considered "primitive" in other languages are syntactically treated the same as functions. So imagine an add function like add(a, b), but instead of being named 'add', it's just named '+', like +(a, b). Applying the same transformation as before, this turns into (+ a b).
Using the function application syntax for primitives like + is nice because you get the same flexibility of normal functions, like variable argument length: (+ a b c).
Clojure is a little bit less uniform than other Lispy languages in that it has special brackets for lists (square brackets) and for maps (curly brackets), but that's pretty much it.
Many Clojure tutorials are free! It's difficult to say without knowing nothing about your preference and experience. Everyone's welcome to join Clojure Slack community (for example) which has several tens of thousands of members and dedicated beginners channel. I'm sure if you asked there, you'd get tons of recommendations tailored to you. https://clojurians.slack.com/
(BTW Clojure, as a Lisp dialect, has almost no syntax. You can learn THAT in 5 minutes. The challenge is in training your programming mind to think in totally new concepts)
I personally appreciate Java (and the JVM) much more after having tried other languages/ecosystems that people kept saying were so much better than Java. Instead, I just felt like it was a "the grass is greener" every time. The only other language that I felt was an actual massive improvement is Rust (which so far has been a joy to work with).
It's a shame imo that it's not seen as a "cool" option for startups, because at this point, the productivity gap compared to other languages is small, if nonexistent.
Funny. I've been trying rust for the past 2 months fulltime, and i'm really wondering how you can call it a "joy to work with" when compared to java, at least for server development.
Rust feels like walking on a minefield, praying to never meet any lifetime problem that's going to ruin your afternoon productivity ( recently lost an afternoon on something that could very well be a known compiler bug, but on a method with such a horrible signature that i never can be sure. in the end i recoded the thing with macros instead).
The feeling of typesafety is satisfying , i agree. But calling the overall experience a "joy" ?
I'm not discounting your experience, or saying you're wrong or anything like that. I've been writing Rust for a while, and for me, that feeling went away. Lifetime/ownership problems used to run me over but it almost never happens anymore. I think Rust has a rather severe "hump" that a lot of people run headlong into, but it does get better, I promise you. You start thinking in ownership/borrowing terms and it just fades into the background at some point. Rust is easily my most productive language now. Again, not discounting your experience at all, it can be rough starting out.
i do feel much more comfortable with lifetimes than at the beginning. I get the general concept, and i barely have to explicitely set them (i did start by religiously reading the rust book, of course).
However, at the moment i still feel i'm using a huge amount of layers upon layer of complex type definitions in order to get anything done. Just using an object's reference across async calls in a safe manner leads to insane types and type constraints, which read like ancient egyptian scripture. And at every layer, i feel like changing anything could blow everything up with lifetimes.
The language has this very special feel of something both advanced and extremely raw and low-level at the same time. It's very unique.
In my experience, beginners often make the mistake of assuming just because you can do things with references and lifetimes that you should. Unless you’ve done profiling, just start with the easy thing and clone an `Arc` (or whatever other data structure helps you avoid lifetime problems)!
Also, it’s worth saying, you probably don’t need async.
oh, believe me, cloning and Arc-ing is something i realized very early that i was going to use. But that's the point: you still end up with things like : Arc<tokio::RwLock<dyn MyTrait>> for every single dependency.
Then you want to declare an async function that takes an async closure over that dependency. And you end up with a total garbage of a method signature.
As for async, the ecosystem for server-side is totally filled with async everywhere now. I don't think it's realistic to hope escaping those issues anyway in any real-world project. i thought i might as well learn to get comfortable with async.
Not all lifetime problems are just a matter of learning. I've been picking up Rust every few years to catch up, and every single time I've eventually expressed a lifetime that either required unstable Rust at the time or hit a known lifetime bug.
You eventually learn you leverage lifetimes. You just need to get over that point in the learning curve. I very rarely run into those types of issues, and it's very freeing knowing that I can write libraries that are so hard to misuse because you can leverage the type system.
i indeed got the feeling that rust style favors macros over complex function signatures.
I'm still unsure if it's a good thing in general, because as a general rule meta programming is always harder to debug. But for simple macros it seems like a nice trick.
I am keeping up, but honestly i feel like rust dev is a bit like a trap : people like us love challenges and solving technical problems. So whenever we "triumph" over a rust tricky compilation issue, we feel intense gratification in solving it.
However, at some point you have to ask yourself why you're accepting to face all those challenges. Is it worth it ? When was the last time i faced a race condition when developping a backend ?
The reason i started with rust was for a very specific need on building a cross-platform library (including wasm), and that was a good justification, and i'm happy that i did. However now that i'm using it for the server as well and face the same kind of challenges, i seriously question whether this is a wise choice.
> I've been trying rust for the past 2 months fulltime,
> recently lost an afternoon on something that could very well be a known compiler bug
With respect, at two months, you're still in the throes of the learning curve, and it seems highly unlikely you've found a compiler bug. Most folks (myself included) struggled for a few months before we hit the 'joyful' part of Rust.
I hope the same, and TBH it's the only reason i'm keeping up developing that backend in rust. I hope that in the end, it's going to improve my style.
Go felt the same way (but with a much lower order of magnitude) : you feel like bumping into language limitations, but once you learn to do it "simply" in go, your style will have changed into something much more elegant.
As for the bug in question, it has been quite "popular" for about 5 years now, and is actively tracked : https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/110338. Nothing really weird. Just async hitting the limits of the current rust design.
Simply using axum with code using multiple layers of async was enough.
But then again, it looked like this bug (the error message is the same), however at this point i'm really unsure if it's exactly the same. The error message and the method signature was so atrocious that i just gave up and found a simpler design using macros that dodged the bullet.
Personally I think C# is miles ahead of Java and in meaningful ways (like a drastically better implementation of generics, not to mention value types have existed for eons at this point and an FFI system that doesn't hate you for using it)
But nobody seems to talk about or care about C# except for Unity. Microsoft really missed the boat on getting mindshare for it back in the day.
Problem with C# isn't the language, it's the enterprise ecosystem. You always feel like you're going to have to pay at some point down the road for using the tech.
Every large company I’ve ever worked at had a strict “no Microsoft on the server” policy and for better or worse, C# is closely identified with Microsoft.
The poster was talking about the ecosystem not the core platform. The wider Java ecosystem was heavily dominated by many Apache (and other) open source libraries vs commercial products for the C# ecosystem.
Java has a strong history of OpenSource, and a great set of libraries. It also pioneered the managed dependency system early (Maven), so these libraries have been centrally available for two decades.
Moreover, a lot of these libraries are well-supported to this day. For example, Hibernate (the best ORM in business) is 28 years old, and has just released a new version. I recently consulted my former client (from 15 years ago), and I still recognized most parts of the stack that I set up way back then.
> But nobody seems to talk about or care about C# except for Unity. Microsoft really missed the boat on getting mindshare for it back in the day.
There was this guy Miguel de Icaza. From when I followed the open source ecosystem at the time, it seemed to be his personal mission to promote independent clones of a bunch of Microsoft technologies like C# on his own time even though they didn't ask him to do it.
I don't think I ever understood why someone would do this. It's like in the 2000s where people seemed to think you could solve all technical problems by inventing new kinds of XML.
Depends where you work. I've seen a lot of Java and .NET jobs around where I am. Having both jobs I find it easier to get performant code in .NET than Java (reified generics, value types, more primitives/less boxing in general, and other constructs not found in Java)
C# had the chance to learn from Java. Java was a bit rushed. Gosling said he was not given enough time to add closures. Even without generics, Java would have been quite elegant and much less verbose. The alternative, anonymous inner classes, were quite clunky.
Nevertheless, as a platform, the JVM and JDK were fantastic and miles ahead most alternatives during the late 1990s and 2000s. The only platform for large development that offered some compelling advantages was Erlang, with BEAM and OTP.
Java could have easily caught up with C# in the early 2000s. In 2001 Pizza (Scala's ancestor) showcased generics, higher-order functions, ADTs and pattern matching. Interestingly enough only generics made it to Java in a reasonable timeframe, the rest came only much later.
Aside from early versions being rushed, I feel that Java's success and adoption were the bigger issue. While Microsoft could iterate quickly and break backwards compatibility with major versions of C# and the .NET runtime, Java was deliberately moving at a much slower pace.
That's because the Microsoft of 2000 - 2014, the Ballmer era, was Microsoft-first. It didn't care about other platforms, it didn't care about the web, and it didn't care about open source. C# could be great, but it existed in a bubble.
Java kept growing and wound up everywhere. It played nice with Linux. Enterprise Mac developers didn't have trouble writing it with IntelliJ. It spread faster because it was open.
Satya Nadella fixed a lot of Microsoft's ills, but it was too late for C# to rise to prominence. It's now the Github / TypeScript / AI era, and Satya is killing it.
The one good thing to say about Ballmer is that he kicked off Azure. Microsoft grew from strength to strength after that.
Definitely not. All the stuff I was used to get for free and advice I that was one google search away ... just dont exist in dotnet. Or is expensive. But most of the time, there is weaker library not doing nearly enough and that is all that exists.
Its actually quietly very popular in very boring contexts outside of Silicon Valley. Its also slowly entering new areas now that Linux builds are rock solid.
It barely works on non MS platforms,has had many slightly incompatible versions so it's a non starter for many projects where I run into that might benefit from c#. I spoke to a manager recently who had invested in silverlight in the past. Based on that alone it was a no MS policy for his development teams.
Quite a few languages "loved" by "Linux communities" tend to have rather rudimentary integration with Linux kernel's facilities or worse packaging story.
For example, Go does not understand cgroups limits and needs an external package to solve this. .NET can read and accommodate those natively. It also ships with excellent epoll-based socket engine implementation. It's on par with Go (although I'm not sure which one is better, but .NET performs really well on high-throughput workloads).
They intentionally chose to not have checked exceptions though, and people have different opinions on it. They believed that people would just catch Exception most of the time anyway instead of selecting on a very specific type (which is often how it works, in web apps anyway.)
I don't know that I'd say "messed up", but I do wish C# had checked exceptions. I strongly believe that they are superior to non-checked exceptions, basically static type signatures but for error handling. It's a real pity that everything after Java seems to have abandoned the idea.
Java streams and a lot of other APIs are extremely ugly because of checked exceptions. Conversely, LINQ and delegates and a lot of other syntax is far cleaner in C#.
Your linked blog is pretty wild. Only throw RuntimeExceptions to crash? Why not just Exit if that's the proper thing to do?
If you treat all C# exceptions as RuntimeExceptions, then it satisfies the blog anyhow.
IIRC all previous conversations about checked exceptions here ended up with the swift conclusion that they are heavily discouraged throughout Java code.
And more. I'm not sure what you found in (checked) exceptions. If you'd like explicit error handling, we have holy grail in the form of Rust which beautifully solves it with implicit returns, error type conversions and disambiguation between error and panic model. I'd prefer to use that one as it actually reduces boilerplate and improves correctness, the opposite to the outcome of using checked exceptions.
> I'd prefer to use that one as it actually reduces boilerplate and improves correctness, the opposite to the outcome of using checked exceptions.
Reducing boilerplate is not a valuable goal in and of itself. The question is, does the boilerplate buy you something? I think that with checked exceptions it does. Having an explicit type signature for what errors a function can raise improves correctness a great deal because the compiler can enforce the contracts of those functions.
I agree that the Rust approach is good too, though I don't agree it has any strong advantages over the way Java does things. Both approaches are equally respectable in my view.
None of those arguments are convincing. In many cases, you can't handle errors more reasonably than just crashing or telling the user something went wrong. Java has RuntimeExceptions, which do not have to be declared in the function signature. Division by zero, or trying to index an array out of bounds, and the dreaded NullPointerException, are some examples of RuntimeExceptions.
My opinion on that is the projects scale. Typically people came from a 10+ year Java project of 100+ engineers, to a greenfield advanced hello-world -- of course it's going to feel better and more productive.
Also, as open-source folks say, "rewrite is always better". It also serves as a good security review. But companies typically don't have resources to do complete rewrites every so often, I saw it only in Google.
I've worked in 3 of the biggest rails codebases in the world (Shopify being the last) and I can say from experience that rails legacy monoliths are infinitely worse to work with than some awful, but harmless, sea of struts XML legacy.
I find this really interesting, and meets my (limited) Rails experience and (extensive) Java experience:
I found it hard taking over an existing Rails project - it felt frail to me, that any small change might have unexpected consequences.
Whereas when I've taken over Java projects - or come in late to an existing team - I felt quite confident getting started, even if it is a bit of a mess.
same! mid-way through my almost 3 decade career I got bored and thought lets try some non-JVM projects, for 2 years I took projects using other languages etc… worse two years of my career :)
My feelings exactly. Go was particularly disappointing, it promised everything but only felt like a sidegrade from Java. Screw it, a downgrade, until go errors get stack traces.
The reason I prefer the Go ecosystem to Java is cultural, rather than technical. Sure, the JVM is very impressive and the language has been evolving, but the culture around Java seems to encourage needless complexity.
Of all the languages I've had to work with trying to get to know unfamiliar code-bases, it's the Go codebases I've been quickest to grok, and yielded the fewest surprises since as the code I'm looking for is almost always where I expect it to be.
Leaning heavily into object orientation, including baking in things like companion objects, object expressions, etc. Encouraging utility classes that tack half-baked functionality onto existing types. Smart casts encouraging overly complex hierarchy.
While operator overloading and infix functions aren't a Java anti-pattern, I also think the language would be improved by their removal.
It is all but impossible to use Kotlin without an IDE telling you everything, and for that I find the language interesting. And for comparison, I did in fact write Java without an IDE for an extended period of time.
The don't embrace that culture. Embrace a simpler culture. Strive for simplicity. Push for fewer dependencies.
Simple example, JAX-RS running on top of Java SE. I agree, JAX-RS is not what one might call "simple". It IS complex, or I should say, it CAN be complex. But Happy Path, staying in the middle of the road, it's pretty sweet for knocking out HTTP backed services. The Jersey reference implementation will do most anything you need (including stuff not "included" in raw JAX-RS). No need for a container, no need for a lot that stuff and all that hanger-on. The core runtime is pretty broad and powerful.
Consider my current project, it uses the built in Java HTTP server. Which works! It's fast, it's functional, it's free. (Yes, it's in a com.sun.net... package, but it's not going anywhere.) It's awkward to use. It's aggravatingly raw. It follows the tenet "why be difficult, when, with just a little effort, you can be impossible."
So, I wrote a simple "servlet-esque-ish" inspired layer for response and request handling, a better path based regex-y router, and a nicer query parser for queries and forms. 500 lines. Add on a JSON library and I can process JSON-y web request/response, easily. (I also wrote my own Multipart processor -- that was another 500 lines, boy that was fun, but most folks don't need that.)
A little bit of code and the built in server is MUCH easier to use. No tomcat, no deploys, zip. ...and no dependencies (save the JSON library).
Something all of these cool frameworks and such have shown me is what's really nice to have, but at the same time, just what isn't really necessary to get work done. I mean, CDI is really neat. Very cool. But, whoo boy. So I have a single singleton to handle application life cycle and global services. It works great with tests. I have a 50 line Event Bus. I have a 100 line "Workflow Engine". 150 line java.util.Logger wrapper (which is mostly, you know, wrapper). I wrote that way back whenever they introduced varargs to java (Java 5? 6?). The modern Java logging landscape is just...oh boy. I'm content with JUL -- I can make it work.
My current project is "magic free". I think @Overide in the single annotation anywhere in it. But it's comfortable to use, the cognitive load is quite load (outside of the actual application itself, which is NOT low -- sheesh). No swearing at frameworks. It's all my fault :).
Anyway, the point is that "simple Java" lurks in there. It needs a bit of uplifting, but not a lot.
You've made your point, but note the built-in HTTPS server only supports TLS 1.2, so don't use that for production code. (For testing it's probably fine.)
True, but the culture around go isn't any better. In my experience go developers are former java developers so they have the same culture of thinking it's ok to ignore how a unix system works. So you will have awful logging, daemons that never report they're ready, badly handmade command line parsing and so on.
funny. java is known for its stacktraces where you need 3 vertical monitors stacked together to see the whole thing and it still doesn't tell you anything useful about why the app crashed.
I think that's a bit unfair. Generally the stacktraces tell you exactly what and where the problem is. Generally shouldn't be more than a dozen lines or so.
The main area they get excessively lengthy is in certain frameworks and testing tools that can add like 100 lines to the trace.
Compared to Go where I always have to remember to print the stack trace in every goroutine’s panic handler or use a custom error type that includes the stack trace or I get nothing? And I have to do this very basic thing for every service I spin up? This might not matter for pet projects or CLI applications, but it matters a lot in large scale mission critical servers.
Tip of the Day: You can wrap errors using "fmt.Errorf" in Go - this gives you a nice chain of error messages which is a pseudo stack trace. Another tip is to define and leverage sentinel errors when wrapping errors so you can test using "errors.Is" higher up when doing error handling in the call-hierarchy - like when mapping to http errors or exit codes.
Using "fmt.Errorf" is lean and painless compared to defining custom errors.
Same here. I started to really like java after working with js/ts on small to medium project. I started to love java after working in on medium to little big project.
Right on, James Gosling's work is amazing, and he and the whole Java ecosystem have my gratitude: I went to the first Java World Tour conference and wrote a little blog article about it that was linked on Sun's home Java page for about a year. I was very lucky, and since I was the first search hit for 'Java consultant' for a very long time that gave my wife and I the freedom to live in a rural area and I could get remote work for a decade.
As long as I am expressing gratitude, I would also like to call out the Clojure team for developing a wonderful ecosystem in top of Java and the JVM.
It must be wonderful to do work that positively affects the lives of millions of people.
I am also very grateful to James Gosling. I was working with C++ at Taligent (an Apple, IBM, and HP joint venture) in the fall of 1995 when I first downloaded Java to give it a try. I literally jumped up and down with joy after writing my first "Hello, World" program. It was such a breath of fresh air compared to the Taligent CommonPoint application framework we were building.
I took the severance package when Taligent imploded, dropped everything I was doing at the time, and have been working with Java and its related software ever since.
I think it's incredible with hindsight how Java countered many of the mid 90s C++ problems, especially by avoiding multiple inheritance.
It remains a shame that it didn't launch with generics though, and I still think operator overloading would have been good. Had it done so I think a lot more people would have stuck around for when the performance improved with HotSpot.
I've been working in .NET/C# for the past few years, and while I'm happy with it, I still think the JVM/Java are the best ecosystem overall I've worked in. It's amazing how many things the Java ecosystem gets right that .NET gets wrong.
For instance, Java introduced the fork/join pool for work stealing and recommended it for short-lived tasks that decomposed into smaller tasks. .NET decided to simply add work-stealing to their global thread pool. The result: sync-over-async code, which is the only way to fold an asynchronous library into a synchronous codebase, frequently results in whole-application deadlocks on .NET, and this issue is well-documented: https://blog.stephencleary.com/2012/07/dont-block-on-async-c...
Notice the solution in this blog is "convert all your sync code to async", which can be infeasible for a large existing codebase.
There are so many other cases like this that I run into. While there have been many mistakes in the Java ecosystem they've mostly been in the library/framework level so it's easier to move on when people finally realize the dead end. However, when you mess up in the standard library, the runtime, or language, it's very hard to fix, and Java seems to have gotten it more right here than anywhere else.
I’m not sure a thread pool implementation can immune to misuse (many tasks that synchronously block on the completion of other tasks in the pool). All you can do is add more threads or try to be smarter about the order tasks are run. I’m not a thread pool expert, so I might have no idea what I’m talking about.
Interesting. I'm not a .Net programmer, but I always thought .Net takes winning approach from Java ecosystem and adopts it. Java approaches/frameworks are kinda pioneering and competing, while .Net follows and grabs the best. So instead of competing approaches/frameworks (like ORMs for example) .Net has only one, the best one, well adopted and used by everyone there.
But reading your message it doesn't sound like it.
That's a very harsh reply with zero evidence behind it. Based on your response, I am willing to bet I understand the platform better than you do. And the deadlocks I'm referring to are happening in apps written by other people who've been in the .NET ecosystem exclusively for more than a decade, or even two decades.
But does citing a more-recent article matter to you? Probably not. A source being 13 years old only matters if something relevant has changed since then, and you certainly couldn't be bothered to point out any relevant change to support your otherwise fallacious and misleading comment.
What actually amazes me most about this is that people in .NET seem to want to blame the person writing sync-over-async code like they are doing something wrong, even going so far as to call it an "anti-pattern", when in reality it is the fault of poor decision-making from the .NET team to fold work-stealing into the global thread queue. The red-blue function coloring problem is real, and you can't make it go away by pretending everyone can just rewrite all their existing synchronous code and no other solution is needed.
If all you know is one ecosystem, then it seems you are susceptible to a form of Stockholm syndrome when that ecosystem abuses you.
> For example, starting with .NET 6 there is a pure C# threadpool implementation that acts differently under problematic scenarios.
We're seeing this issue entirely in .NET core. We started on .NET 6, are currently on .NET 8, and will likely migrate to 10 soon after it is released. It's again worth mentioning that you provide zero evidence that .NET 6 solves this problem in any way. Although, as we will see below, it seems like you don't even understand the problem!
> I'm certain you're basing this off of your personal experience from more than a decade ago of some forsaken codebase written in an especially sloppy way.
No, I'm referring to code written recently, at the job I work at now, at which I've been involved in discussions about, and implementations of, workarounds for the issue.
> Moreover, there isn't a single mention that the real way to get into actual deadlock situation is when dealing with applications enriched with synchronization context.
100% false. This deadlock issue has nothing to do with synchronization contexts. Please actually read the 2020 article I linked as it explains the issue much better.
> Pathetic attempt at strawman.
I realize responding to this is to just fight pettiness with more pettiness, but I can't resist. You should probably look up the definition of a strawman argument since you are using the word incorrectly.
To me a claim "how many things the Java ecosystem gets right that .NET gets wrong" borders on insanity if we consider having to interact with Maven or even Gradle on a daily basis after .NET's CLI and NuGet, or having to deal with type erasure in generics, or weird stream API shape, or not having common slice and sequence types that everything nicely unifies under because primitives cannot be generalized, or not being able to author properties and extension methods, creating dozens upon dozens of type copies or just boilerplate accessors, or having to tolerate Hibernate after EF Core, and so on and so forth.
As for async and tasks - have you ever considered just not writing the code that is so bad it managed to bypass cooperative blocking detection and starvation mitigations? It's certainly an impressive achievement if you managed to pull this off while starting with .NET 6.
Edit: I agree with the subsequent reply and you are right. Concurrency primitives are always a contentious topic.
I have no problem with you preferring .NET to Java, and I apologize that my first-cited article was not the best one to share to describe the problem (I should have read it more carefully first), but if you had responded with something like:
"Your deadlock scenario is related to synchronization contexts and can be avoided by ..."
rather than:
"You clearly don't know what you're talking about (but I won't bother telling you why)"
Then we could have had a much more productive and pleasant conversation. I would have responded with:
"Sorry, that article wasn't the right one to share. Here is a better one. The issue I am talking about isn't synchronization context-related at all. It's actually much more insidious."
Java is a great success story. Though, to be fair, James Gosling was the spark but has not been the steward.
Even as early as Java 1.1 and 1.2 he was not particularly involved in making runtime, library, or even language decisions, and later he wasn't the key to generics, etc.
Mark Reinhold has been the hand's-on lead since 1.1, first integrating early JIT's, HotSpot, the 1.2 10X class explosion, and has been running the team all the way through Oracle's purchase, making the JVM suitable for dynamic language like Kotlin and Clojure, open-sourcing, moving to a faster release cadence, pushing JVM method and field handles that form the basis for modern language features, migrating between GC's, and on and on.
As far as I can tell, everything that makes Java great has come down to Mark Reinhold pushing and guiding.
The whole core team is amazing. Gosling wanted a language that was practical from a development POV. Over the years, it's been refined into a language with a fair amount of mechanical sympathy on top of the development experience. Thanks to folks like Mark Reinhold and Brian Goetz.
I have no love for Oracle the big bad company. But I am deeply greatful they've managed to keep that group moving forward.
I went to a Java school. I remember my operating systems class involved writing simulated OS code in Java (for example, round robin for context switching). The argument was that it would be easier to understand the algorithms if the hardware complexities were minimized. I understand that sentiment, but I don't think Java was the right choice. Python would have accomplished the same task even better (understanding algorithms). I think there was a huge influence from industry to teach college students Java from day one. I had taught myself BASIC and some C back in high school, so it was a bit of a step backwards to learn a high-level language just to do simulated low-level OS programming.
My school started us off in microcontroller programming in C then Java for intro to data structures and OOP then back to C (and MIPS assembly) for systems/OS/concurrency. One thing I appreciate Java over Python for DS/Algo is the clear delineation between abstract data type and underlying data structure - IMO is easy to get a wrong mental model with Python. But teaching OS concepts in Java seems a little crazy to me.
A lot of the arguments Joel makes in that article also apply to Python, and pretty much any other higher-level language that doesn't make you think about pointers. Ironically, he points out the Google had a great leap over Microsoft with MapReduce, which was built in Java.
The original version of MapReduce was written in C++. The successor library, Flume, was however written in Java, but Spolsky would certainly have been referring to the original MapReduce, since the Flume paper wasn't published until 2010.
Back in the early 2000s, I was taught in C, C++, Motorola 68HC11, and MIPs assembly. I can clearly understand how Java works, even if I don’t know its GC is implemented. I can understand how programs were written from the 80s to currently. Had I learned programming in Java or, worse, Python, I doubt I’d have the same understanding. It’s relatively easy to go from low level to high level languages if you’re willing to give up control. My experience is that the opposite is less true. It’s certainly possible, but not as straightforward as understanding some foundational ideas.
I admire Java as a success story, but I still have a deeply ingrained aversion to it for many reasons. I will admit that many of the reasons are due to Java's legacy as the language of bloated corporations, and its creation of overly verbose, magic fueled frameworks and poorly written code. Java as a language goes hand in hand with the idea that code is coal to be shoveled into the furnace, and we should all throw our aspirations away and embrace mediocrity.
My other issues with the JVM is how much of a black box it is from a platform perspective, which makes debugging a PITA with standard ops tools like strace, gdb, etc. The JVM's over allocation of memory robs the kernel of real insight as to how the workload is actually performing. When you use the JVM, you are completely locked in and god help you if there isn't a JVM expert to debug your thing and unravel how it translates to a platform implementation.
Then of course there's the weird licensing, it's association with Oracle, managing JDK versions, it's lack of it factor in 2025, and a huge boatload of legacy holding it back (which is not unique to Java).
I have successfully navigated my career with minimal exposure to Java, and nowadays there's a glut of highly performant languages with GC that support minimal runtimes, static compilation, and just look like regular binaries such that the problems solved by something like the Java or Python VMs just aren't as relevant anymore - they just add operational complexity.
To reiterate, I admire JG just like any tech person should. Java's success is clear and apparent, but I'm glad I don't have to use it.
>My other issues with the JVM is how much of a black box it is from a platform perspective, which makes debugging a PITA
Java has one the greatest debugging capabilities ever. dynamic breakpoints, conditional breakpoints, hell you can ever restart a stack frame after hot deploying code without a restart. You can overwrite any variable in memory, set uncaught exception breakpoints, and even have the JVM wait for a debugger to connect before starting. There is no equivalent in any other language that does _all_ of these things. And to top this off, there is 0 equivalent to Idea or Eclipse for any other language.
For runtime dynamics, JMX/JConsole is good enough for daily use, Java Flight Recorder gives you deep insight, or in a system you don't have direct access to. Hell even running jstack on a JVM is a good debug tool. If those don't do the trick, there's plain old HPROF (similar to other languages) and Eclipse Memory Analyzer.
>Then of course there's the weird licensing,
The JVM is open source. There are no licensing issues. OpenJDK can be freely downloaded and run in production without restrictions on any use. If you really want to buy a JVM from Oracle... well thats your prerogative.
The Java API has its fair deal of baggage due to its extreme backward compatibility. Boolean.getBoolean[1] is one of the more accessible examples of a bad API that exists only because of legacy reasons, but there quite a number of them.
IT factor! Am I on a fashion website now? What kind of argument is that? Also, why on earth would you use strace or gdb for Java? It has enormously performant debugging tools in the JDK. Also, IDE debugging integration is second to none.
Because if I'm debugging a critical issues and wading through multiple layers of processes and system interactions, I don't want to have to learn a bespoke toolkit and debugging system for every single process.
The tooling is pretty easy to learn if scary looking at first and becoming a JVM expert, at least in the context of GC tuning, might take you a week or less. Some of the defaults are surprising though.
And I think there is some parallel with the kernel vs GC and mmap vs buffer pools - the GC simply has better context in the scope of the application. With other processes in the picture, though, yeah there is some provisioning complexity there.
That's a really narrow view of the world, and I think another Javaism to think that Java is the entire world. Today's multi-service deployments run tens if not hundreds of auxiliary processes not using Java. They use network overlays that change how processes interact with the network core. A person who is debugging a knock on effect issues has to be able to look through many different layers of processes, many of which are written in C, C++, Go, etc. Having to learn an entire toolset to debug Python or Java is a huge burden and it makes introspection extremely difficult. Java essentially wants to be the entire platform, which isn't how the world works anymore.
Don't you think a narrow view of the world is this idea that you should be able to use one tool to debug everything? It seems like you want GDB (and the unix's where it runs) to be the entire platform.
When you need to debug across the entire system and into the kernel, I'd use dtrace which has had java stack frame support since... I don't remember anymore, but closing in on 20 years.
In my 20+ years using java, not once have I used strace or gdb. Java itself has fantastic debugger support, and IDEs have built in step through capabilities.
Mentioning Java and Python in the same way in the context of performance is really odd. Python is nowhere near the JVM when it comes to performance
It sounds like you've only ever written code without dealing with it in production. You can't always plug your code into an IDE when your debugging someone else's JVM app on a remote server.
Please - you can definitely do this in Java. Its been a standard basic feature of Java tooling for 25 years now. (Its the equivalent of saying that Rust doesn't have a package manager).
I strongly urge reading some elementary tutorials to educate yourself.
Java's debugging experience is better than any language out there - with the possible exception of Common LISP. I always cry when I need to debug a project written in another language after so much comfort using Java.
> Gosling primarily uses the NetBeans IDE for development, praising its open source, Apache-licensed nature and dedicated community. He expresses frustration with developers who cling to outdated tools: “The thing that drives me nuts the most are people who are madly grasping the ’80s or the ’70s — people who still want to use Vi, which was high-tech in the ’70s.”
From one of the key developers in the Emacs history, and genesis.
He moved on, others keep trying to live in the past.
Modern stacks (as in go and rust) are largely editor agnostic - it is Gosling who lives in the past, thinking that an IDE is still required(and a very weak one, in case of abandoned Netbeans). One of the reasons, btw, why I would take Go over Java in a heartbeat.
When Gosling was at Sun, he was one of two principal architects of the NeWS Window system. The X Window system was designed for "dumb" display devices and so the display elements were all static, not requiring much work from the server. NeWS was designed to run on a (Sun) workstation, where there was a lot of computational power available, so it was based on Postscript. A NeWS client would send a program to the server, not just static commands.
Gosling, unsurprisingly, designed Java with the NeWS model in mind, where web pages were programs, not just static HTML documents. When I got him to sign my copy of "The Java Programming Language", I asked him if Java was the revenge of NeWS. He just smiled.
The corollary of this was Display PostScript. At my first job we had a SPARCStation 2 with a SPARCprinter. The SPARCStation was a mighty wonder to behold, with a storage pedestal and a lovely OpenWindows GUI on a luxurious Sun monitor and color framebuffer. The operator sitting at the desk was often just a novice clerical worker, but we ran a few Internet services on the machine as well. However, our department depended on that SPARCprinter to spit out hundreds of sheets of paper daily.
We could not depend on the printer to stay functional, though. Have you heard of a Winmodem? SPARCprinters were essentially that: they were configured as a "dumb display device" where all the imaging logic was contained in the software and run on the server. A page was written in PostScript, rendered on the print server, and dispatched to the printer as if it were a framebuffer/monitor.
Unfortunately, for whatever reason, the server software was not so reliable, or the printer hardware wasn't reliable, and because of this peculiar symbiotic parasitism, whenever our printer wedged, our server was also toast. Every process went into "D" for device wait; load averages spiked and all our work ground to a halt. We would need to pull the worker off the desktop, reboot the whole server, and start over with the printer.
That printer haunted my dreams, all though my transition from clerk, to network operator, to sysadmin, and it wasn't until 2011 when I was able to reconcile with printers in general. I still miss SunOS 4 and the whole SPARC ecosystem, but good riddance to Display PostScript.
Java is completely revitalized now and is my favorite platform.
The main problem is the legacy code and attitude out there, dependency injection, using Spring or Spring Boot etc SUCKS. VertX is/was good but now with virtual threads you dont need all the async complexity.
Been coding on the JVM for a good chunk of my career. Though the last several years has been in languages other than Java - Scala, Clojure (my personal favorite), and Kotlin.
Finally managed to get a job offer (after being unemployed for a bit) doing Python. It's starting to look like demand for JVM experience is beginning to wane. Might be time to move on anyway :shrug:
I'm old... as long as there's a steady paycheck involved, I'll code in whatever language you say.
Though, currently working on a little personal project in Scala. :)
"Gosling Emacs was especially noteworthy because of the effective redisplay code, which used a dynamic programming technique to solve the classical string-to-string correction problem. The algorithm was quite sophisticated; that section of the source was headed by a skull-and-crossbones in ASCII art, warning any would-be improver that even if they thought they understood how the display code worked, they probably did not."
The vast majority of Java developers will never touch modern Java and have zero idea of its features or capabilities. I'm in the process of migrating literally thousands of servers and tens of thousands of apps to the cloud and there isn't anything close to modern Java. The absolute majority at this client seems to be Java 8 and there isn't a single Java 17 or newer. So it's one thing to have great modern features. But if you're going to be a Java developer it'll take work / luck to actually be able to use decent versions of it. Very similar story with C++. If you're on a great cutting edge team, you might be able to use the shiny new stuff. But more than likely you'll be relegated to some C++11 at the latest.
I haven't seen things quite so bad on the .NET side at this client. Yes there's a ton of legacy ASP.NET apps. But there are also a lot of .NET Core apps. They haven't quite made it to the post Core versions of .NET, but it's still a healthier state than I see with Java. I guess all of this to say that modern versions of "ancient" programming languages are great and really do improve things. But chances are if you're working with an ancient programming language you'll be stuck maintaining legacy shit and won't ever get to utilize the shiny stuff.
This is keeping in mind that your average programmer will never even try to interview for FAANG never mind grind leetcode and programming language trivia for weeks like seems so common here.
Well to be fair, if you wanted Performance, Linux support, and a framework which was built with dependency injection and async support in mind and not just have them as patched in footguns, you had to migrate to .NET Core. A Java 8 Spring app was just good enough.
Wrong. Linux support is first class in .Net just like Windows. We are strictly running our .Net code on linux servers and have encountered 0 problems over the past 5 years.
James Gosling, Robert Pike and Geoffrey Hinton are my top 3 "Canadians who meaningfully changed things in technology" (tho, I should probably make it a top 5, add Brian Kernighan and figure out someone else)
I have heard it about the situation in 1995, but it probably also holds to a good extent now: You appreciate Java (only) after you have experienced/experience other languages.
Java stagnated for a while, but has now picked up steam. With things like GraalVM, the stellar ecosystem, generally very good performance and changes to the language, it is more and more pleasant to use.
It may not be cool to use Java for startups, but we do and are immensely productive with it.
The java.net.Inet4Address and Inet6Address could be more lightweight.
For a simple IPv4 address normally representable using 4 bytes/ 32 bits Java uses 56 bytes. The reason for it is Inet4Address object takes 24 B and the InetAddressHolder object takes another 32 B. The InetAddressHolder can contain not only the address but also the address family and original hostname that was possibly resolved to the address.
For an IPv6 address normally representable using 16 bytes/ 128 bits Java uses 120 bytes. An Inet6Address contains the InetAddressHolder inherited from InetAddress and adds an Inet6AddressHolder that has additional information such as the scope of the address and a byte array containing the actual address. This is an interesting approach especially when compared to the implementation of UUID, which uses two longs for storing the 128 bits of data.
Java's approach is causing 15x overhead for IPv4 and 7.5x overhead for IPv6 which seems excessive. What am I missing here? Can or should this be streamlined?
What a wonderfully HN response to a biographical piece on James Gosling.
For my part, most of the Java code that I have written that needs to use IP addresses needs somewhere between 1 and 10 of them, so I'd never notice this overhead. If you want to write, like, a BGP server in Java I guess you should write your own class for handling IP addresses.
Because there was nothing else quite like it at the time most enterprise software was created or recreated.
And it's still stable, fast and reliable with a massive ecosystem of stable, fast and reliable libraries and software. With good developer tooling, profilers and debuggers to go with it. And big enterprise support teams from RedHat, Oracle, IBM, etc. throwing in their (paid) support services.
It might not be the best language in any of the categories (speed - runtime and compile time, tooling, ecosystem, portability, employee pool), but there's pretty much almost no languages that are as good in all categories at once.
And to top it off, JVM can host other languages so it can easily interoperate with more modern takes on language design like Kotlin while still running on pretty much all major operating systems used in the wild and most CPU architectures as well. It'll run on your car's SoC, your phone and on your server. In many cases, using the same libraries and same code underneath.
I believe there were alternatives at the time, but expensive. Java was free and also syntactically compatible with C++. I think that rather these properties (than being somewhat unique) are the main causes of its success.
That’s just obtuse. Compare Lisp, Forth, APL, Prolog, Ada, or Fortran. Java is just C++ with a few twists. You can literally write code that will compile in both.
That's exactly how I meant it. Another alternative to Java at the time was Smalltalk, with different syntax. Choosing C++ syntax for Java was clearly a marketing move (as it was for C++) - we shouldn't underestimate network effect of familiar syntax.
I think Java succeeded for the same reasons C++ succeeded - built on familiar syntax, reasonably free and "supported by" a large company. Java being a decent language is a consequence of its success more than of its original design.
I worked in IT from the 90s to today. My perspective is it grew and grew because Sun supported it, then IBM supported it, RedHat supported it. It had the glimmer that it was the "Enterprise Way" of doing "Real IT" programming for "Real Businesses". I am not saying any of that is the "Truth", just the perception that was held by the majority of people who could choose what to write enterprise code in.
Microsoft had C#, at one point IBM pushed SmallTalk. C++ for these environments is doable but going to slow you down at development a lot, as well as being much harder to secure.
At that time the dynamic alternative was Perl, and that remained true basically until Rails came along.
I am not sure. C# came long after Java already made inroads into the Enterprise space. It was a different time.
I would say that many things in IT are not chosen on technical merits alone. You have people that do not want to accrue any blame. Back then, by choosing what IBM endorses or what Microsoft endorses, you absolve yourself of fallout from if and when things go wrong.
Back in the 90s, it felt like IBM, Redhat, Sun kind of, sort of, got together and wanted to keep Microsoft from taking over the Enterprise space by offering Java solutions.
Right. Before Microsoft created .NET and C# they first tried to play their "embrace, extend, extinguish" trick with Java. They released a JVM and "Visual J++" language which was sort of Java, but had incompatible proprietary extensions to lock customers in to Windows. Eventually they were forced to stop that for legal reasons so they completely dropped all Java support, and built their own replacement virtual machine and associated languages from scratch.
Yes, its early popularity was very much management-driven, based on magazine articles and the like. Its object-oriented design (often presented as if something new) was supposed to make programmers fungible, and its portability was supposed to let you build an app that would run on anything. And it had a Real Corporation behind it, which appealed to corporate management.
In the late 90s, I got stuck making a scheduling program in Java, but it had to run on the 16-bit Windows systems of the time. That was a huge pain, because the 16-bit version didn't have all the capabilities that management was expecting based on the hype. These days, I sometimes have to install enormous enterprise applications that tie up north of 32G of RAM even though they're just basic hardware management tools that would take a fraction of that if built in something like C++ with a standard GUI library. I manage to avoid Java most of the time, but it's been an occasional thorn in my side for 30 years.
Consider that in the mid 90's when it arose, most organisations were writing business code in C++ and paying license fees for things as simple as string handling libraries. There was almost no good solution to cross platform network code. RPC calls required things like manually dealing with byte order.
Then most organisations had deployed windows for staff but needed to run things on Sun servers. Java was a god send as a free and actually cross platform solution that let devs work on windows and run the same thing on the corporate server infra without changes. The culture at the time would not consider deploying scripting language sfor full scale applications acceptable, so Java with it's C++-like structure but built in cross platform capabilities and generous stack of batteries included libraries (for the time) was an absolute god send.
It's safe. It's easy to hire anyone from anywhere to write Java. You generally can't create an ungodly mess apart from layers and thousands of classes. There's a library for almost everything. It'll still be around in 10/20 years. It's good enough
Java beta & 1.0 were released my Freshman year of college and I've been writing Java ever since. With the exception of one job where we tried to write a Java-style Enterprise security cloud application in Python every commercial product I've worked on has been built in primarily Java, often times with other languages on the edges of the application.
The key thing I think with Java is the programming model & structure scale well with team size and with codebase size, perhaps even in a way that tolerates junior developers, outsourced sub-teams, and even lower quality developers. All of those things end up becoming part of your reality on big Enterprise products, so if the language is somehow adding some tolerance for it that is a good thing.
The other things around Syntax and such that people complain about? Those are often minor considerations once the team size and code base size get large enough. Across my career there has always been the lone guy complaining that if we did everything in a LISP derived language everything would be perfect. But that guy has almost always been the guy who worked on a small tool off by himself, not on the main product.
Java has changed a tremendous amount as well. A modern Java system has very little in common with something written before Generics and before all the Functional code has been added. Where I work now we have heavily exploited the Functional java add-ons for years, it has been fantastic.
Decent tooling. Been around for long enough that a lot of the quirks of it are well known and documented. Basically it's a blue collar programming language without too many gotchas. Modern(ish) day Cobol.
(I'm predominantly a Java dev still, even after diversions over the years to Javascript, Python and C#).
on one level this is clearly “shipping the org chart”, but… honestly, even as no fan of Java this is clearly efficient on many levels, especially when you consider the humans and org to be part of the system (which everyone should. or it’s just my HCI brain talking.).
it hits a sweet spot of reliable, C-like, fast enough for most things, with a ton of library/framework support. plus Sun and later Oracle pushed it hard in the 90s/00s. it'll be the new COBOL.
Another way to look at it based on coming across it in enterprise:
How did he build something adopted by so many enterprises?
It does some things at scale very well and has been afforded the performance improvements of very smart people for 30y.
It’s not to say the language isn’t verbose, one of my favourite features was the ability to write code in other languages right inside the a Java app pretty well in-line by using the JVM, thanks to JSR-223.
It was possible to write Ruby or Python code via Jruby or Jython and run it in the JVM.
My biggest gripe with Java is the only really viable IDE option is from a for-profit company and that it routinely gobbles up my RAM. I used Eclipse and Netbeans back in the day but IntelliJ is superior before it becomes unusable.
Ode to Java. Boy, I love Java. When I switched jobs way back, a condition was that the new project was going be using Java.
GC. Single file modules. No "forward". The Collection suite. Fast compiles.
The magic of the ClassLoader. The ClassLoader, that was insightful. I don't know how much thought went into that when they came up with it, but, wow. That ClassLoader is behind a large swath of Java magic. It really hasn't changed much over time, but boy is it powerful.
When I started Java, I started it because of the nascent Java web stack of the day. Early servlets and JSP. I picked because of two things. One, JSPs were just Servlets. A JSP was compiled down into a Servlet, and shazam, Servlet all the way down. Two, single language stack. Java in JSPs, Java in Servlets. Java in library code. Java everywhere. In contrast to the MS ASP (pre .NET) world.
Mono-language meant my page building controller folks could talk to my backend folks and share expertise. Big win.
Servlets were a great model. Filters were easy and powerful. Free sessions. Free database connection pools in the server. I mean, we had that in '98, '99.
And, of course, portability. First project was using Netscapes server, which was spitting up bits 2 weeks before we went live, so we switched to JRun in a day or two (yay standard-ish things...). Then, Management(tm) decided "No, Sun/Oracle, we're going NT/SQL Server". Oh no. But, yup, transitioned to that in a week. Month later, CTO was fired, and we went back to Sun/Oracle.
Java EE had a rough start, but it offered a single thing nobody else was offering. Not out of the box. Not "cheap", and that was a transaction manager, and declarative transactions on top of that. We're talking about legit "Enterprise grade" transaction manager. Before you had Tuxedo, or MS MTS. Not cheap, not "out of the box", not integrated. JBoss came out and gave all that tech away. Then Sun jumped on with early, free, Sun Java Enterprise 8 which begat Glassfish which was open source. Glassfish was amazing. Did I mention that the included message queues are part and parcel of the integrated, distributed transaction model for Java EE? Doesn't everyone get to rollback their message queue transactions when their DB commit fails? Message Driven Beans, sigh, warms my heart.
There were certainly some bad decisions in early Java EE. The component model was far too flexible for 95% of the applications and got in the way of the Happy Path. Early persistence (BMP, CMP) was just Not Good. We punted on those almost right away and just stuck with Session Beans for transaction management and JDBC. We were content with that.
The whole "everything is remote" over CORBA IIOP and such. But none of that really lasted. EJB 3 knocked it out of the park with local beans, annotations in lieu of XML, etc. Introduction of the JPA. Modern Jakarta EE is amazing, lightweight, stupid powerful (and I'm not even talking Spring, that whole Other Enterprise Stack). There's lots of baggage in there, you just don't have to use it. JAX-RS alone will take you VERY far. Just be gentle, Java Enterprise offers lots and lots of rope.
None of this speaks to the advances in the JVM. The early HotSpot JIT was amazing. "Don't mind me, I'm just going to seamlessly sneak in some binary compiled code where that stack machine stuff was a nano-second ago. I've been watching it, this is better. Off you go!" Like presents from Santa. The current rocket ship that in JDK development (this is good and bad, I still do not like the Java 9 JPMS module stuff, I think it's too intrusive for the vast majority of applications). But OpenJDK, the Graal stuff. Sheesh, just get all light headed thinking about it.
Along with the JVM we have the JDK, its trivial install. Pretty sure I have, like, 20 of them installed on my machine. Swapped out with a PATH and JAVA_HOME change. The JVM is our VM, the Servlet container is our container. Maven is our dependency manager. Our WAR files are self-contained. And all that doesn't go stomping on our computer files like Paul Bunyan and Blue making lakes in Minnesota.
It's no wonder I was struggling to grok all the talk about VMs, Dockers, and containers and all that stuff folks mess with to install software. We never had to deal with that. It just was not an issue.
I can distribute source code, with a pom.xml, and a mvnw wrapper script, and anyone can build that project with pretty much zero drama. Without breaking everything on their system. And whatever IDE they're using can trivially import that project. It's also fast. My current little project, > 10K lines of code, < 3s to clean/build/package.
Obviously, there's always issues. The Stories folks hear are all true. The legacy stuff, the FactoryInterfaceFactoryImpl stuff. The Old Days. It's all real. It's imperfect.
But, boy, is it impressive. (And, hey, portable GUI folks, Java FX is pretty darn good...)
I am wondering what was the role of Guy L. Steele in the creation of Java if he had any. From the article, it looks like it was Gosling alone. I did not cheat by checking on Wikipedia
Java frustrates the absolute shit out of me. An objectively terrible language coupled with insanely great garbage collectors, insanely great JIT compilers, and insanely great IDEs.
Why couldn't we have had these things for Lisp?* I mean, if 1/1000 of the intellectual horsepower that's been thrown at Java had been thrown at Lisp, we'd all be driving to work in orbit-capable flying cars that used a teaspoon of fuel per year.
* Of course Lisp invented the insanely great IDE around 1984 but then everybody forgot about it and had to rediscover the idea 30 years later.
The java ecosystem is great, and the JVM does deserve the appellation of technical marvel, Java the language on the other hand...questionable.
Many of Java's novel language choices have proven unfavorable in the long run (e.g. everything is a class, and even its syntax was needlessly verbose and ceremonious from day one) and all of what makes it a halfway decent language these days are good ideas that originated in other languages, often eons ago, which Java, for some reason, often elects to rebrand with its own terminology.
That said, the maintainers also do a phenomenal job managing the evolution of the language and preserving compatibility, but from a pure programming language design standpoint it's largely a messy amalgam of great ideas from a bunch of other places awkwardly realized. Great, robust ecosystem, great platform, great management, mediocre language design.
The JVM was the first VM I got to know, at uni in like 1996 or so. Had fun building stuff using the Jasmin "assembler". Seems like it's on Github now: https://github.com/davidar/jasmin
> Jasmin was written because, at the time that we wrote the Java Virtual Machine book for O'Reilly, Sun had not published an assembler format for the Java virtual machine.
> Generating a binary Java .class file is pretty fiddly. Its like creating an a.out (or .exe) file by hand. Even using a Java package like JAS (a Java API for creating class files, used internally by Jasmin and written by KB Sriram), you need to know a lot about the philosophy of the Java Virtual Machine before you can write something at the Virtual Machine level and generate a Java class.
> We wanted something that made it very easy for a student or programmer to explore the Java Virtual Machine, or write a new language which targets the VM, without getting into the details of constant pool indices, attribute tables, and so on.
Java syntax isn't perfect, but it is consistent, and predictable. And hey, if you're using an Idea or Eclipse (and not notepad, atom, etc), it's just pressing control-space all day and you're fine.
Java memory management seems weird from a Unix Philosophy POV, till you understand whats happening. Again, not perfect, but a good tradeoff.
What do you get for all of these tradeoffs? Speed, memory safety. But with that you still still have dynamic invocation capabilities (making things like interception possible) and hotswap/live redefinition (things that C/CPP cannot do).
Perfect? No, but very practical for the real world use case.
Java's tools are really top notch. Using IntelliJ for Java feels a whole new different world from using IDEs for other languages.
Speaking of Go, does anyone know why Go community is not hot on developing containers for concurrent data structures? I see Mutex this and lock that scattering in Go code, while in Java community the #1 advice on writing concurrency code is to use Java's amazing containers. Sometimes, I do miss the java.util.concurrent and JCTools.
In fact my experience has been that overuse of channels is a code smell that alot of new go developers fall into and later regret. There's a reason the log package uses a mutex for synchronization.
In general I think channels are great for connecting a few large chunks of your program together. Concurrency is great but also not every function call benefits from being turned into a distributed system.
I think that it would be a great idea to develop more concurrent go data structures with generics and I suspect inertia is what's keeping the community from doing it.
My credentials such as the are: been writing go since 1.0. worked at Google and taught go classes as well as owned some of the original go services (the downloads server aka payload server).
But then I have also encountered Rust people that will look down on Java but had no idea buffered I/O had higher throughput than unbuffered.
The patterns are available, its up to the community to apply proper concurrency patterns.
You can use platform threads, user-space threads, language-provided "green" threads, goroutines, continuations or whatever you wish for concurrency management, but that's almost orthogonal to data safety.
Java the language eventually drove me away because the productivity was so poor until it started improving around 2006-2007.
Now I keep an eye on it for other languages that run on the JVM: JRuby, Clojure, Scala, Groovy, Kotlin, etc.
IMO JRuby is the most interesting since you gain access to 2 very mature ecosystems by using it. When Java introduced Project Loom and made it possible to use Ruby's Fibers on the JVM via Virtual Threads it was a win for both.
Charles Nutter really doesn't get anywhere close to enough credit for his work there.
You can take pretty much any code written for Java 1.0 and you can still build and run it on Java 24. There are exceptions (sun.misc.Unsafe usage, for example) but they are few and far between. Moreso than nearly any other language backwards compatibility has been key to java. Heck, there's a pretty good chance you can take a jar compiled for 1.0 and still use it to this day without recompiling it.
Both Ruby and Python, with pedigrees nearly as old as Java's, have made changes to their languages which make things look better, but ultimately break things. Heck, C++ tends to have so many undefined quirks and common compiler extensions that it's not uncommon to see code that only compiles with specific C++ compilers.
Which also points to another thing where Java compatibility shines. One can have a GUI application that is from nineties and it still runs. It can be very ugly especially on a high DPI screen, but still one can use it.
Although Python is pretty close, if you exclude Windows (and don't we all want to do that?).
This takes nothing away from Java and the Java ecosystem though. The JVM allows around the same number of target systems to run not one language but dozens. There’s JRuby, Jython, Clojure, Scala, Kotlin, jgo, multiple COBOL compilers that target JVM, Armed Bear Common Lisp, Eta, Sulong, Oxygene (Object Pascal IIRC), Rakudo (the main compiler for Perl’s sister language Raku) can target JVM, JPHP, Renjin (R), multiple implementations of Scheme, Yeti, Open Source Simula, Redline (Smalltalk), Ballerina, Fantom, Haxe (which targets multiple VM backends), Ceylon, and more.
Perl has a way to inline other languages, but is only really targeted by Perl and by a really ancient version of PHP. The JVM is a bona fide target for so many. Even LLVM intermediate code has a tool to target the JVM, so basically any language with an LLVM frontend. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a PCode to JVM tool somewhere.
JavaScript has a few languages targeting it. WebAssembly has a bunch and growing, including C, Rust, and Go. That’s probably the closest thing to the JVM.
I'm only half joking. Perl has so many ways to do things, many of them obscure but preferable for specific cases. It's often a write-only language if you can't get ahold of the dev who wrote whatever script you're trying to debug.
I wonder if modern LLMs could actually help with that.
From experience, they can.
Java was marketed (at least in its early days) as a WORA language - WRITE ONCE RUN ANYWHERE.
Perl was unmarketed as a WORM language - WRITE ONCE READ MANY (TIMES). ;)
jk, i actually like perl somewhat.
but I think Larry and team went somewhat overboard with that human-style linguistics stuff that they applied to perl.
No, you really can't. Not anything significant anyway. There are too many deviations between some of those systems to all you to run the same code.
There are differences, but they’re usually esoteric ( https://perldoc.perl.org/perlport#PLATFORMS ).
There's also Groovy.
I wonder what other languages run on the JVM. What about Perl, Icon, SNOBOL, Prolog, Forth, Rexx, Nim, MUMPS, Haskell, OCaml, Ada, Rust, BASIC, Rebol, Haxe, Red, etc.?
Partly facetious question, because I think there are some limitations in some cases that prevent it (not sure, but a language being too closely tied to Unix or hardware could be why), but also serious. Since the JVM platform has all that power and performance, some of these languages could benefit from that, I'm guessing.
#lazyweb
I don’t know if it is a me problem or if I’m missing the right incantations to set up the environment or whatever. Never had that much problems with Java.
But I’m a Java and Ruby person so it might really be missing knowledge.
I no longer shy away from writing <500 LOC utility/glue scripts in python thanks to uv.
e.g. poetry, venv and pyenv have been mentioned in just the next few comments below yours. and this is just one example. i have seen other such seeming confusion and different statements by different people about what package management approach to use for python.
Prior to that I would frequently have issues (and still have issues with one-off random scripts that use system python).
This is not my experience with Java at all. I very often have to modify $JAVA_HOME.
It always made me wonder why I hear about companies who are running very old versions of Java though. It always seemed like backwards compatibility would make keeping up to date with the latest an almost automatic thing.
Another problem is crashes. Java runtime is highly reliable, but still bugs happens.
(It's still a valid point. It's just not the point you labeled it as.)
Java is, in my opinion, a complete mess. And I think it's weird how anybody could like it past the 1990s.
C++ not being compilable later hasn't been true since pre standard C++. We're talking 1980s now.
https://blog.habets.se/2022/08/Java-a-fractal-of-bad-experim...
The whole spec was great with the exception of entitybeans.
It provided things that are still not available it anything else.. why do we store configuration/credentials in git (encrypted, but still).
And the context were easy to configure/enter.
Caucho’s resin, highly underrated app server. Maybe not underrated, but at least not very well known
In the early 2000's, I used to work on JEE stuff for my day job, then go home and build PHP-based web apps. PHP was at least 10x more productive.
I grew to be a big fan of JBoss and was really disappointed when the Torquebox project stopped keeping up (Rubyized version of JBoss).
JRuby could also run on Graal as well.
The fact that you specifically mention Go explains a lot. btw c# is faster than Java, so not third place, it's more a 5th~
https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...
Benchmarks aren’t all that useful since usually the bottleneck is File IO, external api calls, db calls, user latency or a combo of the 4.
Go’s main advantage in this matchup would be conciseness.
Go code looks so clean and nice, Java doesn’t.
I personally don’t care for Java, but I have bills so it’s always in my back pocket. Things happen , sometimes you need to write Java to eat.
“Fred, you really should just take the job.”
“Martha you don’t understand, it’s Java with an Oracle DB.”
“Fred, I know it’s bad, I know you still have nightmares about the 4 types of string in Java 8, but it’s not just us now.”
With a tear in his eye , fear in his heart.
“Martha, if I must… I’ll open Eclipse once more.”
I write Java to pay bills and my eyes and fingers thank me everyday for sparing them from a sea of if err != nil. I won't even go(!) into the iota stupidly compared to Java's enums.
This is something I greatly value with the recent changes to Java. They found a great way to include sealed classes, switch expression, project Loom, records that feels at home in the existing Java syntax.
The tooling with heap dump analyzers, thread dump analyzers, GC analyzers is also top notch.
Hearing the work he and others did to gradually introduce pattern matching without painting themselves into a corner was fascinating and inspiring.
When Java got popular, around 1999-2001, it was not a close third behind C (or C++).
At that time, on those machines, the gap between programs written in C and programs written in Java was about the same as the gap right now between programs written in Java and programs written in pure Python.
Only have to deal with gigalines of log4j excreta filling up disks.
But if your organization doesn't assign that work to you, then sure, it's not your problem.
Edit: 1.4, not 1.7
and that's before you throw in real multithreading
I'd also throw in what was possibly their greatest idea that sped adoption and that's javadoc. I'm not sure it was a 100% original idea, but having inline docs baked into the compiler and generating HTML documentation automatically was a real godsend for building libraries and making them usable very quickly. Strong typing also lined up nicely with making the documents hyper-linkable.
Java was really made to solve problems for large engineering teams moreso than a single developer at a keyboard.
Indeed. Many languages have something similar to Javadoc, yet somehow I haven't encountered anything quite as good as Javadoc, and I can't explain why or exactly how it's better. I admit I haven't tried that hard either. But I suspect it's down to the nature of the language and how, with well designed libraries at least (and not all are, certainly,) there is a nice decomposition of modules, packages, classes/interfaces and methods that leads to everything somehow having a correct place, and the Javadoc just follows. The strong typing is another contributor, where 90% of the time you can just look and the signature and imply what is intended. Finally, the old-fashioned frames based HTML typically used with Javadoc is a great benefit.
Also, I've found I experience less reluctance to author Javadoc for some reason. Again, part of this is due to strong types, and much of the legwork being correctly generated in nearly every case.
Lombok, when used with moderation, is wonderful. Mockito is magic, of a good kind. Maven still gets it done for me; I've yet to care about any problems Gradle purports to solve, and I think that's down to not creating the problems that Gradle is designed to paper over in the first place.
Today, if I had my choice of one thing I'd like to see in Java that doesn't presently exist it's Python's "yield". Yes, there are several ways to achieve this in Java. I want the totally frictionless generators of Python in Java.
Fastest at what, exactly?
So giving the entire system to the JVM, performing some warmup prior to a service considering itself “healthy”, and the JVM was reasonably fast. It devoured memory and you couldn’t really do anything else with the host, but you got the Java ecosystem, for better or worse).
There was a lot of good tooling that is missing from other platforms, but also a ton of overhead that I am happy to not have to deal with at the moment.
With the JVM you basically outsource all the work you need to do in C/C++ to optimize memory management and a typical developer is going to have a hell of a time beating it for non-trivial, heterogenous workloads. The main disadvantage (at least as I understand) is the memory overhead that Java objects incur which prevent it from being fully optimized the way you can with C/C++.
The GC story is just great, however. Pretty much the best you can get in the entire ecosystem of managed-memory languages.
You have different GC algorithms implemented, and you can pick and tune the one that best fits your use-case.
The elephant in the room is of course ZGC, which has been delivering great improvements in lowering the Stop-the-world GC pauses. I've seen it consistently deliver sub-millisecond pauses whereas other algorithms would usually do 40-60 msec.
Needless to say, you can also write GC-free code, if you need that. It's not really advertised, but it's feasible.
As someone who's always been interested in gamedev, I genuinely wonder whether that would be good enough to implement cutting-edge combo modern acceleration structures/streaming systems (e.g. UE5's Nanite level-of-detail system.)
I have the ability to understand these modern systems abstractly, and I have the ability to write some high-intensity nearly stutter-free gamedev code that balances memory collection and allocation for predicable latency, but not both, at least without mistakes.
The GC would be the least of your problems.
Java is neat, but the memory model (on which the GC relies) and lack of operator overloading does mean that for games going for that level of performance would be incredibly tedious. You also have the warm up time, and the various hacks to get around that which exist.
Back when J2ME was a thing there was a mini industry of people cranking out games with no object allocation, everything in primitive arrays and so on. I knew of several studios with C and even C++ to Java translators because it was easier to write such code in a subset of those and automatically translate and optimize than it was to write the Java of the same thing by hand.
There's no value types (outside primitives) and everything is about pointer chasing. And surely if there was less pointer chasing it'd be easier to do the GC work at the same time.
It is not feasible under the JVM type system. Even once Valhalla gets released it will carry restrictions that will keep that highly impractical.
It's much less needed with ZGC but even the poster child C# from the GC-based language family when it comes to writing allocation-free and zero-cost abstraction code presents challenges the second you need to use code written by someone who does not care as much about performance.
The downside is that you sacrifice a lot of the benefits of guard rails of the language and tooling for what may not end up being much savings, depending on your workload.
Using the function application syntax for primitives like + is nice because you get the same flexibility of normal functions, like variable argument length: (+ a b c).
Clojure is a little bit less uniform than other Lispy languages in that it has special brackets for lists (square brackets) and for maps (curly brackets), but that's pretty much it.
i am not a clojure or lisp expert, just saying.
(BTW Clojure, as a Lisp dialect, has almost no syntax. You can learn THAT in 5 minutes. The challenge is in training your programming mind to think in totally new concepts)
They're really amenable to the REPL.
Not anymore, the competition is doing much better these days.
It's a shame imo that it's not seen as a "cool" option for startups, because at this point, the productivity gap compared to other languages is small, if nonexistent.
Rust feels like walking on a minefield, praying to never meet any lifetime problem that's going to ruin your afternoon productivity ( recently lost an afternoon on something that could very well be a known compiler bug, but on a method with such a horrible signature that i never can be sure. in the end i recoded the thing with macros instead).
The feeling of typesafety is satisfying , i agree. But calling the overall experience a "joy" ?
However, at the moment i still feel i'm using a huge amount of layers upon layer of complex type definitions in order to get anything done. Just using an object's reference across async calls in a safe manner leads to insane types and type constraints, which read like ancient egyptian scripture. And at every layer, i feel like changing anything could blow everything up with lifetimes.
The language has this very special feel of something both advanced and extremely raw and low-level at the same time. It's very unique.
Also, it’s worth saying, you probably don’t need async.
Then you want to declare an async function that takes an async closure over that dependency. And you end up with a total garbage of a method signature.
As for async, the ecosystem for server-side is totally filled with async everywhere now. I don't think it's realistic to hope escaping those issues anyway in any real-world project. i thought i might as well learn to get comfortable with async.
And macros are a part of that!
Rust's macros on the other hand are excellent, and more languages should have expressive macros like that.
I'm still unsure if it's a good thing in general, because as a general rule meta programming is always harder to debug. But for simple macros it seems like a nice trick.
Rust has a horrid learning curve
I've programmed for decades in many languages, and I felt the same as you
Persevere.
Surrender! to compile
Weather the ferocious storm
You will find, true bliss
However, at some point you have to ask yourself why you're accepting to face all those challenges. Is it worth it ? When was the last time i faced a race condition when developping a backend ?
The reason i started with rust was for a very specific need on building a cross-platform library (including wasm), and that was a good justification, and i'm happy that i did. However now that i'm using it for the server as well and face the same kind of challenges, i seriously question whether this is a wise choice.
Generally garbage collectors are very worthwhile
But whe you need it, it is so much better than C or C++
> recently lost an afternoon on something that could very well be a known compiler bug
With respect, at two months, you're still in the throes of the learning curve, and it seems highly unlikely you've found a compiler bug. Most folks (myself included) struggled for a few months before we hit the 'joyful' part of Rust.
Go felt the same way (but with a much lower order of magnitude) : you feel like bumping into language limitations, but once you learn to do it "simply" in go, your style will have changed into something much more elegant.
As for the bug in question, it has been quite "popular" for about 5 years now, and is actively tracked : https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/110338. Nothing really weird. Just async hitting the limits of the current rust design.
It shouldn’t take 2 months of full time programming to beat the learning curve.
Simply using axum with code using multiple layers of async was enough.
But then again, it looked like this bug (the error message is the same), however at this point i'm really unsure if it's exactly the same. The error message and the method signature was so atrocious that i just gave up and found a simpler design using macros that dodged the bullet.
But nobody seems to talk about or care about C# except for Unity. Microsoft really missed the boat on getting mindshare for it back in the day.
Microsoft has been historically much less aggressive with lawyers compared to Oracle.
They also tend to be of higher quality and provide better performance.
Moreover, a lot of these libraries are well-supported to this day. For example, Hibernate (the best ORM in business) is 28 years old, and has just released a new version. I recently consulted my former client (from 15 years ago), and I still recognized most parts of the stack that I set up way back then.
There was this guy Miguel de Icaza. From when I followed the open source ecosystem at the time, it seemed to be his personal mission to promote independent clones of a bunch of Microsoft technologies like C# on his own time even though they didn't ask him to do it.
I don't think I ever understood why someone would do this. It's like in the 2000s where people seemed to think you could solve all technical problems by inventing new kinds of XML.
C# is extremely popular in all kinds of 'boring' industries. Having worked in areas like logistics and civil engineering, C# is everywhere.
Nevertheless, as a platform, the JVM and JDK were fantastic and miles ahead most alternatives during the late 1990s and 2000s. The only platform for large development that offered some compelling advantages was Erlang, with BEAM and OTP.
Aside from early versions being rushed, I feel that Java's success and adoption were the bigger issue. While Microsoft could iterate quickly and break backwards compatibility with major versions of C# and the .NET runtime, Java was deliberately moving at a much slower pace.
Java kept growing and wound up everywhere. It played nice with Linux. Enterprise Mac developers didn't have trouble writing it with IntelliJ. It spread faster because it was open.
Satya Nadella fixed a lot of Microsoft's ills, but it was too late for C# to rise to prominence. It's now the Github / TypeScript / AI era, and Satya is killing it.
The one good thing to say about Ballmer is that he kicked off Azure. Microsoft grew from strength to strength after that.
which ones?
Microsoft isn't thought of as evil anymore, but is open source and Linux friendly. GitHub, VScode, Typescript. Azure is booming, ...
But the big one: stock price.
It's an extremely common language in "boring" companies doing "boring" (but profitable) work.
MS does have an uphill PR battle though.
For example, Go does not understand cgroups limits and needs an external package to solve this. .NET can read and accommodate those natively. It also ships with excellent epoll-based socket engine implementation. It's on par with Go (although I'm not sure which one is better, but .NET performs really well on high-throughput workloads).
See https://mckoder.medium.com/the-achilles-heel-of-c-why-its-ex...
https://www.artima.com/articles/the-trouble-with-checked-exc...
Their belief was wrong. Microsoft now recommends against catching Exception.
The article you linked to is addressed at the bottom of this article: https://mckoder.medium.com/the-achilles-heel-of-c-why-its-ex...
Your linked blog is pretty wild. Only throw RuntimeExceptions to crash? Why not just Exit if that's the proper thing to do?
If you treat all C# exceptions as RuntimeExceptions, then it satisfies the blog anyhow.
Because you won't get a stack trace.
That's so ignorant. Read the article please.
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43226624
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43584056
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36736326
And more. I'm not sure what you found in (checked) exceptions. If you'd like explicit error handling, we have holy grail in the form of Rust which beautifully solves it with implicit returns, error type conversions and disambiguation between error and panic model. I'd prefer to use that one as it actually reduces boilerplate and improves correctness, the opposite to the outcome of using checked exceptions.
Reducing boilerplate is not a valuable goal in and of itself. The question is, does the boilerplate buy you something? I think that with checked exceptions it does. Having an explicit type signature for what errors a function can raise improves correctness a great deal because the compiler can enforce the contracts of those functions.
I agree that the Rust approach is good too, though I don't agree it has any strong advantages over the way Java does things. Both approaches are equally respectable in my view.
I could copy/paste the entire article here... but it would be easier if you could take a gander: https://mckoder.medium.com/the-achilles-heel-of-c-why-its-ex...
Summary:
Crashy code: You have no compiler-enforced way to know what exceptions might be thrown from a method or library.
More crashy code: If a method starts throwing a new exception, you might not realize you need to update your error handling.
Dead code: If a method stops throwing an exception, old catch blocks may linger, becoming dead code.
Also, as open-source folks say, "rewrite is always better". It also serves as a good security review. But companies typically don't have resources to do complete rewrites every so often, I saw it only in Google.
I found it hard taking over an existing Rails project - it felt frail to me, that any small change might have unexpected consequences.
Whereas when I've taken over Java projects - or come in late to an existing team - I felt quite confident getting started, even if it is a bit of a mess.
Of all the languages I've had to work with trying to get to know unfamiliar code-bases, it's the Go codebases I've been quickest to grok, and yielded the fewest surprises since as the code I'm looking for is almost always where I expect it to be.
While operator overloading and infix functions aren't a Java anti-pattern, I also think the language would be improved by their removal.
Simple example, JAX-RS running on top of Java SE. I agree, JAX-RS is not what one might call "simple". It IS complex, or I should say, it CAN be complex. But Happy Path, staying in the middle of the road, it's pretty sweet for knocking out HTTP backed services. The Jersey reference implementation will do most anything you need (including stuff not "included" in raw JAX-RS). No need for a container, no need for a lot that stuff and all that hanger-on. The core runtime is pretty broad and powerful.
Consider my current project, it uses the built in Java HTTP server. Which works! It's fast, it's functional, it's free. (Yes, it's in a com.sun.net... package, but it's not going anywhere.) It's awkward to use. It's aggravatingly raw. It follows the tenet "why be difficult, when, with just a little effort, you can be impossible."
So, I wrote a simple "servlet-esque-ish" inspired layer for response and request handling, a better path based regex-y router, and a nicer query parser for queries and forms. 500 lines. Add on a JSON library and I can process JSON-y web request/response, easily. (I also wrote my own Multipart processor -- that was another 500 lines, boy that was fun, but most folks don't need that.)
A little bit of code and the built in server is MUCH easier to use. No tomcat, no deploys, zip. ...and no dependencies (save the JSON library).
Something all of these cool frameworks and such have shown me is what's really nice to have, but at the same time, just what isn't really necessary to get work done. I mean, CDI is really neat. Very cool. But, whoo boy. So I have a single singleton to handle application life cycle and global services. It works great with tests. I have a 50 line Event Bus. I have a 100 line "Workflow Engine". 150 line java.util.Logger wrapper (which is mostly, you know, wrapper). I wrote that way back whenever they introduced varargs to java (Java 5? 6?). The modern Java logging landscape is just...oh boy. I'm content with JUL -- I can make it work.
My current project is "magic free". I think @Overide in the single annotation anywhere in it. But it's comfortable to use, the cognitive load is quite load (outside of the actual application itself, which is NOT low -- sheesh). No swearing at frameworks. It's all my fault :).
Anyway, the point is that "simple Java" lurks in there. It needs a bit of uplifting, but not a lot.
It's an uphill battle to convince my co-workers to do things my way.
The main area they get excessively lengthy is in certain frameworks and testing tools that can add like 100 lines to the trace.
Using "fmt.Errorf" is lean and painless compared to defining custom errors.
If you wrote code with such deep stacktraces, it's all on you.
There's a performance cost to all that excessive stack depth too, often.
God bless Gemini 2.5 Pro which ate all the traces for breakfast.
As long as I am expressing gratitude, I would also like to call out the Clojure team for developing a wonderful ecosystem in top of Java and the JVM.
It must be wonderful to do work that positively affects the lives of millions of people.
I took the severance package when Taligent imploded, dropped everything I was doing at the time, and have been working with Java and its related software ever since.
It remains a shame that it didn't launch with generics though, and I still think operator overloading would have been good. Had it done so I think a lot more people would have stuck around for when the performance improved with HotSpot.
This is because Java is based on an older language called Objective-C that doesn't have multiple inheritance :)
It's not based on C++, that's just the other OO language from the era people usually think of.
For instance, Java introduced the fork/join pool for work stealing and recommended it for short-lived tasks that decomposed into smaller tasks. .NET decided to simply add work-stealing to their global thread pool. The result: sync-over-async code, which is the only way to fold an asynchronous library into a synchronous codebase, frequently results in whole-application deadlocks on .NET, and this issue is well-documented: https://blog.stephencleary.com/2012/07/dont-block-on-async-c...
Notice the solution in this blog is "convert all your sync code to async", which can be infeasible for a large existing codebase.
There are so many other cases like this that I run into. While there have been many mistakes in the Java ecosystem they've mostly been in the library/framework level so it's easier to move on when people finally realize the dead end. However, when you mess up in the standard library, the runtime, or language, it's very hard to fix, and Java seems to have gotten it more right here than anywhere else.
The thread pool implementation has been tweaked over the years to reduce the impact of this problem. The latest tweak that will be in .NET 10:
https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/112796
I’m not sure a thread pool implementation can immune to misuse (many tasks that synchronously block on the completion of other tasks in the pool). All you can do is add more threads or try to be smarter about the order tasks are run. I’m not a thread pool expert, so I might have no idea what I’m talking about.
But reading your message it doesn't sound like it.
Tell us you don't write any sort of .NET code without telling us so explicitly.
You should pick a platform you have better command of for back-handed comments.
Or at least you should try to do a better job than referencing a post from 13 years ago.
Here's an article from 5 years ago:
https://medium.com/criteo-engineering/net-threadpool-starvat...
But does citing a more-recent article matter to you? Probably not. A source being 13 years old only matters if something relevant has changed since then, and you certainly couldn't be bothered to point out any relevant change to support your otherwise fallacious and misleading comment.
What actually amazes me most about this is that people in .NET seem to want to blame the person writing sync-over-async code like they are doing something wrong, even going so far as to call it an "anti-pattern", when in reality it is the fault of poor decision-making from the .NET team to fold work-stealing into the global thread queue. The red-blue function coloring problem is real, and you can't make it go away by pretending everyone can just rewrite all their existing synchronous code and no other solution is needed.
If all you know is one ecosystem, then it seems you are susceptible to a form of Stockholm syndrome when that ecosystem abuses you.
We're seeing this issue entirely in .NET core. We started on .NET 6, are currently on .NET 8, and will likely migrate to 10 soon after it is released. It's again worth mentioning that you provide zero evidence that .NET 6 solves this problem in any way. Although, as we will see below, it seems like you don't even understand the problem!
> I'm certain you're basing this off of your personal experience from more than a decade ago of some forsaken codebase written in an especially sloppy way.
No, I'm referring to code written recently, at the job I work at now, at which I've been involved in discussions about, and implementations of, workarounds for the issue.
> Moreover, there isn't a single mention that the real way to get into actual deadlock situation is when dealing with applications enriched with synchronization context.
100% false. This deadlock issue has nothing to do with synchronization contexts. Please actually read the 2020 article I linked as it explains the issue much better.
> Pathetic attempt at strawman.
I realize responding to this is to just fight pettiness with more pettiness, but I can't resist. You should probably look up the definition of a strawman argument since you are using the word incorrectly.
As for async and tasks - have you ever considered just not writing the code that is so bad it managed to bypass cooperative blocking detection and starvation mitigations? It's certainly an impressive achievement if you managed to pull this off while starting with .NET 6.
Edit: I agree with the subsequent reply and you are right. Concurrency primitives are always a contentious topic.
Enjoying or tolerating Hibernate is undiagnosed Stockholm Syndrome :D
"Your deadlock scenario is related to synchronization contexts and can be avoided by ..."
rather than:
"You clearly don't know what you're talking about (but I won't bother telling you why)"
Then we could have had a much more productive and pleasant conversation. I would have responded with:
"Sorry, that article wasn't the right one to share. Here is a better one. The issue I am talking about isn't synchronization context-related at all. It's actually much more insidious."
Even as early as Java 1.1 and 1.2 he was not particularly involved in making runtime, library, or even language decisions, and later he wasn't the key to generics, etc.
Mark Reinhold has been the hand's-on lead since 1.1, first integrating early JIT's, HotSpot, the 1.2 10X class explosion, and has been running the team all the way through Oracle's purchase, making the JVM suitable for dynamic language like Kotlin and Clojure, open-sourcing, moving to a faster release cadence, pushing JVM method and field handles that form the basis for modern language features, migrating between GC's, and on and on.
As far as I can tell, everything that makes Java great has come down to Mark Reinhold pushing and guiding.
I have no love for Oracle the big bad company. But I am deeply greatful they've managed to keep that group moving forward.
Kotlin is not a dynamic language, it's statically typed, just like Java.
That's like saying Linus was only the spark for git because he spent two weeks hacking it from scratch.
The whole world uses git now.
I went to a Java school. I remember my operating systems class involved writing simulated OS code in Java (for example, round robin for context switching). The argument was that it would be easier to understand the algorithms if the hardware complexities were minimized. I understand that sentiment, but I don't think Java was the right choice. Python would have accomplished the same task even better (understanding algorithms). I think there was a huge influence from industry to teach college students Java from day one. I had taught myself BASIC and some C back in high school, so it was a bit of a step backwards to learn a high-level language just to do simulated low-level OS programming.
My other issues with the JVM is how much of a black box it is from a platform perspective, which makes debugging a PITA with standard ops tools like strace, gdb, etc. The JVM's over allocation of memory robs the kernel of real insight as to how the workload is actually performing. When you use the JVM, you are completely locked in and god help you if there isn't a JVM expert to debug your thing and unravel how it translates to a platform implementation.
Then of course there's the weird licensing, it's association with Oracle, managing JDK versions, it's lack of it factor in 2025, and a huge boatload of legacy holding it back (which is not unique to Java).
I have successfully navigated my career with minimal exposure to Java, and nowadays there's a glut of highly performant languages with GC that support minimal runtimes, static compilation, and just look like regular binaries such that the problems solved by something like the Java or Python VMs just aren't as relevant anymore - they just add operational complexity.
To reiterate, I admire JG just like any tech person should. Java's success is clear and apparent, but I'm glad I don't have to use it.
Java has one the greatest debugging capabilities ever. dynamic breakpoints, conditional breakpoints, hell you can ever restart a stack frame after hot deploying code without a restart. You can overwrite any variable in memory, set uncaught exception breakpoints, and even have the JVM wait for a debugger to connect before starting. There is no equivalent in any other language that does _all_ of these things. And to top this off, there is 0 equivalent to Idea or Eclipse for any other language.
For runtime dynamics, JMX/JConsole is good enough for daily use, Java Flight Recorder gives you deep insight, or in a system you don't have direct access to. Hell even running jstack on a JVM is a good debug tool. If those don't do the trick, there's plain old HPROF (similar to other languages) and Eclipse Memory Analyzer.
>Then of course there's the weird licensing,
The JVM is open source. There are no licensing issues. OpenJDK can be freely downloaded and run in production without restrictions on any use. If you really want to buy a JVM from Oracle... well thats your prerogative.
> it's lack of it factor in 2025,
sdkman
> a huge boatload of legacy holding it back
what legacy code?
The Java API has its fair deal of baggage due to its extreme backward compatibility. Boolean.getBoolean[1] is one of the more accessible examples of a bad API that exists only because of legacy reasons, but there quite a number of them.
[1] https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/lang/Boolean....
And I think there is some parallel with the kernel vs GC and mmap vs buffer pools - the GC simply has better context in the scope of the application. With other processes in the picture, though, yeah there is some provisioning complexity there.
You state how you don't really use java, but the above confirms it.
Java debugging and diagnostic tooling is second to none.
Mentioning Java and Python in the same way in the context of performance is really odd. Python is nowhere near the JVM when it comes to performance
I strongly urge reading some elementary tutorials to educate yourself.
See https://www.baeldung.com/java-application-remote-debugging for CLI based remote debugging
But most people use IDE's.
See https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/debugging-your-first-jav...
and https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/tutorial-remote-debug.ht...
Java's debugging experience is better than any language out there - with the possible exception of Common LISP. I always cry when I need to debug a project written in another language after so much comfort using Java.
OpenJDK, the de facto standard version used by everyone, is licensed under the GPL version 2 with the classpath exception.
No offence, but you simply aren’t well informed.
From one of the key developers in the Emacs history, and genesis.
He moved on, others keep trying to live in the past.
As for Rust, there is a reason the large majority is either on VSCode or RustRover.
Gosling, unsurprisingly, designed Java with the NeWS model in mind, where web pages were programs, not just static HTML documents. When I got him to sign my copy of "The Java Programming Language", I asked him if Java was the revenge of NeWS. He just smiled.
We could not depend on the printer to stay functional, though. Have you heard of a Winmodem? SPARCprinters were essentially that: they were configured as a "dumb display device" where all the imaging logic was contained in the software and run on the server. A page was written in PostScript, rendered on the print server, and dispatched to the printer as if it were a framebuffer/monitor.
Unfortunately, for whatever reason, the server software was not so reliable, or the printer hardware wasn't reliable, and because of this peculiar symbiotic parasitism, whenever our printer wedged, our server was also toast. Every process went into "D" for device wait; load averages spiked and all our work ground to a halt. We would need to pull the worker off the desktop, reboot the whole server, and start over with the printer.
That printer haunted my dreams, all though my transition from clerk, to network operator, to sysadmin, and it wasn't until 2011 when I was able to reconcile with printers in general. I still miss SunOS 4 and the whole SPARC ecosystem, but good riddance to Display PostScript.
The main problem is the legacy code and attitude out there, dependency injection, using Spring or Spring Boot etc SUCKS. VertX is/was good but now with virtual threads you dont need all the async complexity.
Finally managed to get a job offer (after being unemployed for a bit) doing Python. It's starting to look like demand for JVM experience is beginning to wane. Might be time to move on anyway :shrug:
I'm old... as long as there's a steady paycheck involved, I'll code in whatever language you say.
Though, currently working on a little personal project in Scala. :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosling_Emacs
"Gosling Emacs was especially noteworthy because of the effective redisplay code, which used a dynamic programming technique to solve the classical string-to-string correction problem. The algorithm was quite sophisticated; that section of the source was headed by a skull-and-crossbones in ASCII art, warning any would-be improver that even if they thought they understood how the display code worked, they probably did not."
I haven't seen things quite so bad on the .NET side at this client. Yes there's a ton of legacy ASP.NET apps. But there are also a lot of .NET Core apps. They haven't quite made it to the post Core versions of .NET, but it's still a healthier state than I see with Java. I guess all of this to say that modern versions of "ancient" programming languages are great and really do improve things. But chances are if you're working with an ancient programming language you'll be stuck maintaining legacy shit and won't ever get to utilize the shiny stuff.
This is keeping in mind that your average programmer will never even try to interview for FAANG never mind grind leetcode and programming language trivia for weeks like seems so common here.
Linux support is an afterthought and it shows. And you never know if it might be dropped next year.
It may not be cool to use Java for startups, but we do and are immensely productive with it.
For a simple IPv4 address normally representable using 4 bytes/ 32 bits Java uses 56 bytes. The reason for it is Inet4Address object takes 24 B and the InetAddressHolder object takes another 32 B. The InetAddressHolder can contain not only the address but also the address family and original hostname that was possibly resolved to the address.
For an IPv6 address normally representable using 16 bytes/ 128 bits Java uses 120 bytes. An Inet6Address contains the InetAddressHolder inherited from InetAddress and adds an Inet6AddressHolder that has additional information such as the scope of the address and a byte array containing the actual address. This is an interesting approach especially when compared to the implementation of UUID, which uses two longs for storing the 128 bits of data.
Java's approach is causing 15x overhead for IPv4 and 7.5x overhead for IPv6 which seems excessive. What am I missing here? Can or should this be streamlined?
For my part, most of the Java code that I have written that needs to use IP addresses needs somewhere between 1 and 10 of them, so I'd never notice this overhead. If you want to write, like, a BGP server in Java I guess you should write your own class for handling IP addresses.
The whole fixation of java developers to abstract things leads to countless virtual calls that are actually very slow at runtime.
And it's still stable, fast and reliable with a massive ecosystem of stable, fast and reliable libraries and software. With good developer tooling, profilers and debuggers to go with it. And big enterprise support teams from RedHat, Oracle, IBM, etc. throwing in their (paid) support services.
It might not be the best language in any of the categories (speed - runtime and compile time, tooling, ecosystem, portability, employee pool), but there's pretty much almost no languages that are as good in all categories at once.
And to top it off, JVM can host other languages so it can easily interoperate with more modern takes on language design like Kotlin while still running on pretty much all major operating systems used in the wild and most CPU architectures as well. It'll run on your car's SoC, your phone and on your server. In many cases, using the same libraries and same code underneath.
Not. And certainly not semantically.
I think Java succeeded for the same reasons C++ succeeded - built on familiar syntax, reasonably free and "supported by" a large company. Java being a decent language is a consequence of its success more than of its original design.
An example, please.
...if only the return type was "Crow" then you could .eat() that...
Microsoft had C#, at one point IBM pushed SmallTalk. C++ for these environments is doable but going to slow you down at development a lot, as well as being much harder to secure.
At that time the dynamic alternative was Perl, and that remained true basically until Rails came along.
I would say that many things in IT are not chosen on technical merits alone. You have people that do not want to accrue any blame. Back then, by choosing what IBM endorses or what Microsoft endorses, you absolve yourself of fallout from if and when things go wrong.
Back in the 90s, it felt like IBM, Redhat, Sun kind of, sort of, got together and wanted to keep Microsoft from taking over the Enterprise space by offering Java solutions.
Of course those were much more hazardous languages than Java.
And Oracle (well before the Sun acquisition - in fact, control of Java was basically the main cause of that move).
Any technology that could bag both IBM and Oracle is (or rather was) likely to dominate the enterprise space.
In the late 90s, I got stuck making a scheduling program in Java, but it had to run on the 16-bit Windows systems of the time. That was a huge pain, because the 16-bit version didn't have all the capabilities that management was expecting based on the hype. These days, I sometimes have to install enormous enterprise applications that tie up north of 32G of RAM even though they're just basic hardware management tools that would take a fraction of that if built in something like C++ with a standard GUI library. I manage to avoid Java most of the time, but it's been an occasional thorn in my side for 30 years.
Then most organisations had deployed windows for staff but needed to run things on Sun servers. Java was a god send as a free and actually cross platform solution that let devs work on windows and run the same thing on the corporate server infra without changes. The culture at the time would not consider deploying scripting language sfor full scale applications acceptable, so Java with it's C++-like structure but built in cross platform capabilities and generous stack of batteries included libraries (for the time) was an absolute god send.
The key thing I think with Java is the programming model & structure scale well with team size and with codebase size, perhaps even in a way that tolerates junior developers, outsourced sub-teams, and even lower quality developers. All of those things end up becoming part of your reality on big Enterprise products, so if the language is somehow adding some tolerance for it that is a good thing.
The other things around Syntax and such that people complain about? Those are often minor considerations once the team size and code base size get large enough. Across my career there has always been the lone guy complaining that if we did everything in a LISP derived language everything would be perfect. But that guy has almost always been the guy who worked on a small tool off by himself, not on the main product.
Java has changed a tremendous amount as well. A modern Java system has very little in common with something written before Generics and before all the Functional code has been added. Where I work now we have heavily exploited the Functional java add-ons for years, it has been fantastic.
Decent tooling. Been around for long enough that a lot of the quirks of it are well known and documented. Basically it's a blue collar programming language without too many gotchas. Modern(ish) day Cobol.
(I'm predominantly a Java dev still, even after diversions over the years to Javascript, Python and C#).
Things tend to form fractal systems of systems for efficiency. A cleanly delineated org chart maps to a cleanly delineated codebase.
How did he build something adopted by so many enterprises?
It does some things at scale very well and has been afforded the performance improvements of very smart people for 30y.
It’s not to say the language isn’t verbose, one of my favourite features was the ability to write code in other languages right inside the a Java app pretty well in-line by using the JVM, thanks to JSR-223.
It was possible to write Ruby or Python code via Jruby or Jython and run it in the JVM.
https://www.jython.org/
https://www.jruby.org/
Clojure also runs on the JVM.
https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/technotes/guides/scrip...
GC. Single file modules. No "forward". The Collection suite. Fast compiles.
The magic of the ClassLoader. The ClassLoader, that was insightful. I don't know how much thought went into that when they came up with it, but, wow. That ClassLoader is behind a large swath of Java magic. It really hasn't changed much over time, but boy is it powerful.
When I started Java, I started it because of the nascent Java web stack of the day. Early servlets and JSP. I picked because of two things. One, JSPs were just Servlets. A JSP was compiled down into a Servlet, and shazam, Servlet all the way down. Two, single language stack. Java in JSPs, Java in Servlets. Java in library code. Java everywhere. In contrast to the MS ASP (pre .NET) world.
Mono-language meant my page building controller folks could talk to my backend folks and share expertise. Big win.
Servlets were a great model. Filters were easy and powerful. Free sessions. Free database connection pools in the server. I mean, we had that in '98, '99.
And, of course, portability. First project was using Netscapes server, which was spitting up bits 2 weeks before we went live, so we switched to JRun in a day or two (yay standard-ish things...). Then, Management(tm) decided "No, Sun/Oracle, we're going NT/SQL Server". Oh no. But, yup, transitioned to that in a week. Month later, CTO was fired, and we went back to Sun/Oracle.
Java EE had a rough start, but it offered a single thing nobody else was offering. Not out of the box. Not "cheap", and that was a transaction manager, and declarative transactions on top of that. We're talking about legit "Enterprise grade" transaction manager. Before you had Tuxedo, or MS MTS. Not cheap, not "out of the box", not integrated. JBoss came out and gave all that tech away. Then Sun jumped on with early, free, Sun Java Enterprise 8 which begat Glassfish which was open source. Glassfish was amazing. Did I mention that the included message queues are part and parcel of the integrated, distributed transaction model for Java EE? Doesn't everyone get to rollback their message queue transactions when their DB commit fails? Message Driven Beans, sigh, warms my heart.
There were certainly some bad decisions in early Java EE. The component model was far too flexible for 95% of the applications and got in the way of the Happy Path. Early persistence (BMP, CMP) was just Not Good. We punted on those almost right away and just stuck with Session Beans for transaction management and JDBC. We were content with that.
The whole "everything is remote" over CORBA IIOP and such. But none of that really lasted. EJB 3 knocked it out of the park with local beans, annotations in lieu of XML, etc. Introduction of the JPA. Modern Jakarta EE is amazing, lightweight, stupid powerful (and I'm not even talking Spring, that whole Other Enterprise Stack). There's lots of baggage in there, you just don't have to use it. JAX-RS alone will take you VERY far. Just be gentle, Java Enterprise offers lots and lots of rope.
None of this speaks to the advances in the JVM. The early HotSpot JIT was amazing. "Don't mind me, I'm just going to seamlessly sneak in some binary compiled code where that stack machine stuff was a nano-second ago. I've been watching it, this is better. Off you go!" Like presents from Santa. The current rocket ship that in JDK development (this is good and bad, I still do not like the Java 9 JPMS module stuff, I think it's too intrusive for the vast majority of applications). But OpenJDK, the Graal stuff. Sheesh, just get all light headed thinking about it.
Along with the JVM we have the JDK, its trivial install. Pretty sure I have, like, 20 of them installed on my machine. Swapped out with a PATH and JAVA_HOME change. The JVM is our VM, the Servlet container is our container. Maven is our dependency manager. Our WAR files are self-contained. And all that doesn't go stomping on our computer files like Paul Bunyan and Blue making lakes in Minnesota.
It's no wonder I was struggling to grok all the talk about VMs, Dockers, and containers and all that stuff folks mess with to install software. We never had to deal with that. It just was not an issue.
I can distribute source code, with a pom.xml, and a mvnw wrapper script, and anyone can build that project with pretty much zero drama. Without breaking everything on their system. And whatever IDE they're using can trivially import that project. It's also fast. My current little project, > 10K lines of code, < 3s to clean/build/package.
Obviously, there's always issues. The Stories folks hear are all true. The legacy stuff, the FactoryInterfaceFactoryImpl stuff. The Old Days. It's all real. It's imperfect.
But, boy, is it impressive. (And, hey, portable GUI folks, Java FX is pretty darn good...)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NVuTBL09Dn4
Why couldn't we have had these things for Lisp?* I mean, if 1/1000 of the intellectual horsepower that's been thrown at Java had been thrown at Lisp, we'd all be driving to work in orbit-capable flying cars that used a teaspoon of fuel per year.
* Of course Lisp invented the insanely great IDE around 1984 but then everybody forgot about it and had to rediscover the idea 30 years later.
Zero money programmers >> Zero interest rate programmers :-)
You can keep the Java, thanks.
Many of Java's novel language choices have proven unfavorable in the long run (e.g. everything is a class, and even its syntax was needlessly verbose and ceremonious from day one) and all of what makes it a halfway decent language these days are good ideas that originated in other languages, often eons ago, which Java, for some reason, often elects to rebrand with its own terminology.
That said, the maintainers also do a phenomenal job managing the evolution of the language and preserving compatibility, but from a pure programming language design standpoint it's largely a messy amalgam of great ideas from a bunch of other places awkwardly realized. Great, robust ecosystem, great platform, great management, mediocre language design.
> Jasmin was written because, at the time that we wrote the Java Virtual Machine book for O'Reilly, Sun had not published an assembler format for the Java virtual machine.
> Generating a binary Java .class file is pretty fiddly. Its like creating an a.out (or .exe) file by hand. Even using a Java package like JAS (a Java API for creating class files, used internally by Jasmin and written by KB Sriram), you need to know a lot about the philosophy of the Java Virtual Machine before you can write something at the Virtual Machine level and generate a Java class.
> We wanted something that made it very easy for a student or programmer to explore the Java Virtual Machine, or write a new language which targets the VM, without getting into the details of constant pool indices, attribute tables, and so on.