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Ask HN: What Happened to Ceylon Language?

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Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Ceylon Language?

#21

Post by kjsingh »

stickfigure wrote: post #17

I frequently wish I had Ceylon's union + intersection types in Java. Typescript has them, but they aren't as rigorous. Also the collection classes were rethought and designed with immutability in mind (reading a list is a different interface from mutating a list). Honestly, it was/is a pretty great language. I think their biggest mistake was picking Eclipse as the IDE. They eventually produced an IntelliJ plugin but…

wasn't it coz Eclipse team was working on Ceylon? also Scala3 has the union + intersection types

Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Ceylon Language?

#22

Post by astrange »

nadavwr wrote: post #9

The "better Java" niche was hot during Java's stagnation era (starting 2006 and lasting for almost a decade). The JVM was considered a great runtime, with a stagnant language, and lots of newer languages competed in that niche. Scala and Clojure, and later Kotlin and others benefited greatly from that niche. The problem for the "better Java" niche was that Java never had to be the best JVM language in order to beat i…

It doesn't seem like the JVM is that great to me; it's so memory-inefficient that it can't be performant except by brute force, and Java's famous lack-of-expressiveness is reflected in the bytecode too.

Of course it does exist and works, so it's mature which is something. But all constants are in memory instead of on disk, no value types, gigantic headers on every object?

C#/.NET is better here.

Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Ceylon Language?

#24

Post by Yeroc »

It was essentially killed during Google I/O (May 2017) when Google announced that it would add Kotlin as an official programming language for Android development. This gave Kotlin a huge boost in visibility at a time when a number of languages including Ceylon were competing as alternative JVM-languages. RedHat understood that and a few months later it was announced that Ceylon was being donated to Eclipse which was a euphemistic way of saying it was now abandonware.

It's too bad because I personally preferred Ceylon over Kotlin.

Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Ceylon Language?

#25

Post by invalidname »

astrange wrote: post #22
nadavwr wrote: post #9

The "better Java" niche was hot during Java's stagnation era (starting 2006 and lasting for almost a decade). The JVM was considered a great runtime, with a stagnant language, and lots of newer languages competed in that niche. Scala and Clojure, and later Kotlin and others benefited greatly from that niche. The problem for the "better Java" niche was that Java never had to be the best JVM language in order to beat i…

It doesn't seem like the JVM is that great to me; it's so memory-inefficient that it can't be performant except by brute force, and Java's famous lack-of-expressiveness is reflected in the bytecode too. Of course it does exist and works, so it's mature which is something. But all constants are in memory instead of on disk, no value types, gigantic headers on every object? C#/.NET is better here.

You should update your knowledge on this matter. I suggest reading about GrallVM, Loom, Valhalla and many such topics. JVM also has much wider support in terms of management and 3rd party enterprise tooling.

Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Ceylon Language?

#26

Post by astrange »

invalidname wrote: post #25
astrange wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't seem like the JVM is that great to me; it's so memory-inefficient that it can't be performant except by brute force, and Java's famous lack-of-expressiveness is reflected in the bytecode too. Of course it does exist and works, so it's mature which is something. But all constants are in memory instead of on disk, no value types, gigantic headers on every object? C#/.NET is better here.

You should update your knowledge on this matter. I suggest reading about GrallVM, Loom, Valhalla and many such topics. JVM also has much wider support in terms of management and 3rd party enterprise tooling.

I'm aware, but GraalVM isn't "the JVM" (HotSpot) and Valhalla hasn't shipped yet.

(I didn't realize but apparently Valhalla is 8 years old now?)

Apparently it has SIMD now, so that's nice.

Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Ceylon Language?

#27

Post by invalidname »

astrange wrote: post #26
invalidname wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should update your knowledge on this matter. I suggest reading about GrallVM, Loom, Valhalla and many such topics. JVM also has much wider support in terms of management and 3rd party enterprise tooling.

I'm aware, but GraalVM isn't "the JVM" (HotSpot) and Valhalla hasn't shipped yet. (I didn't realize but apparently Valhalla is 8 years old now?) Apparently it has SIMD now, so that's nice.

It's a JVM that solves a lot of the overhead issues. There are multiple other implementations that can provide a level of scale that's available nowhere else (e.g. Azul).

My point is that the JVM has a huge 3rd party driven ecosystem that's moving at scale. It has very deep backend adoption and has many upcoming projects that will make it even better e.g. project leyden, panama, etc.

Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Ceylon Language?

#28

Post by kaba0 »

astrange wrote: post #22
nadavwr wrote: post #9

The "better Java" niche was hot during Java's stagnation era (starting 2006 and lasting for almost a decade). The JVM was considered a great runtime, with a stagnant language, and lots of newer languages competed in that niche. Scala and Clojure, and later Kotlin and others benefited greatly from that niche. The problem for the "better Java" niche was that Java never had to be the best JVM language in order to beat i…

It doesn't seem like the JVM is that great to me; it's so memory-inefficient that it can't be performant except by brute force, and Java's famous lack-of-expressiveness is reflected in the bytecode too. Of course it does exist and works, so it's mature which is something. But all constants are in memory instead of on disk, no value types, gigantic headers on every object? C#/.NET is better here.

Do check out the binary-tree benchmark of the benchmark game. You can see how ridiculously ahead of every other managed language Java is when it comes to GC - and while C# and Go can indeed get away with slightly less allocations (until Valhalla happens at least), my experience is that object allocation can’t be that easily avoided in most general purpose applications, and allocation/GC is often the bottleneck at the typical big web application scale. Here Java’s state-of-the-art GC algorithm(s) are pretty much unbeatable.

It is not without reason that FAANG and Fortune500 companies have many/most of their critical web services running on top the JVM (Apple, Google, Amazon, Alibaba, Twitter, etc).

Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Ceylon Language?

#29

Post by kaba0 »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #16

Kotlin killed it, espceially with Google picking it for Android. I remember looking at it and it had some weird stuff and I liked Kotlin better, and Groovy was going strong. Kotlin is a "better java" from a footgun/safety + syntax perspective, and better than Ceylon in most features and ways. So it won that war. And here is another bad idea, from Ceylon's wikipedia: "Modularity built into the language, based on JBoss…

I really don’t buy this Scala complicated myth. It is a very small language, which is very expressive and has very powerful features. But it is not a complicated language, which I would leave for Rust and C++ having many features instead. Kotlin seems to have more features in-built than Scala even. Scala chooses more powerful features that incorporate the functionality of many.
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