Rise and fall of JVM languages • Hacker News Board

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#21

Post by xchaotic » Mon, Aug 21, 2017, 9:59 AM UTC

ztjio wrote: post #8

amelius wrote: post #2

I'm not a Java guy, but I'm still wondering why nobody every wrote a JVM with near-zero startup time.

Well I am a Java guy and have two points to make. First. What are you even talking about? Quiet:test user$ time java Test Test real 0m0.104s user 0m0.074s sys 0m0.028s Quiet:test user$ That's on a current MBP 13" top end. And second: Who cares? What us "Java guys" do with Java, well, it doesn't matter in the slightest that it takes half a second to start. Because, we deploy to running processes. "We" power things lik…

The obsessions are because you can have serverless architecture and spin up things on demand. If you Need to load a ton of things that kills performance and latencies add up.

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#22

Post by olavgg » Mon, Aug 21, 2017, 9:59 AM UTC

chii wrote: post #13

Insanity wrote: post #9

I'm surprised to see that Groovy slightly beats Kotlin in on that graph. I really underestimated Groovy popularity, or overestimated Kotlin. I've yet to work with Kotlin but did like Groovy some years ago. Never used it professionaly though, only for play-projects.

groovy is great. It doesn't have much marketing behind it, so it's seems to be a bit of a quiet achiever. But for dsl makin', groovy is such a good language.!

We use Groovy in production, working with SQL, Transactions or JSON is much easier than Java. Meta programming and Traits are other advantages. The biggest advantage is that it is so similar to Java code, that any Java developer can pick it up and understand it immediately.

We still love and use Java a lot and they both complement each other very well.

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#23

Post by federicodalmaso » Mon, Aug 21, 2017, 10:02 AM UTC

You forget scala-native project: https://github.com/scala-native/scala-native It seems to have major traction looking at contributions trend. Together with scala.js it open up the scala language to three different outputs: native (LLVM), js and JVM. Great strategy in my opinion.

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#24

Post by ojosilva » Mon, Aug 21, 2017, 10:07 AM UTC

I wonder why Kotlin beat Scala in this virtual programming language traction game. I don't write code for the JVM anymore, but Kotlin occupies the same space as Scala.

Was it compilation speed? Corporate support?

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#25

Post by izacus » Mon, Aug 21, 2017, 10:07 AM UTC

federicodalmaso wrote: post #23

You forget scala-native project: https://github.com/scala-native/scala-native It seems to have major traction looking at contributions trend. Together with scala.js it open up the scala language to three different outputs: native (LLVM), js and JVM. Great strategy in my opinion.

How does it compare to Kotlin native/JS outputs?

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#26

Post by krig » Mon, Aug 21, 2017, 10:08 AM UTC

> I started developing in Java, late 2001. At that time, Java was really cool.

As someone who was there in 2001, I just have to say: Java was never cool, and especially not at that time. It was bloated and ugly and slow, the GC was terrible, applets were simply the worst, the UI toolkits available looked horrible on every single platform. There were no decent IDEs or editors and the language was if possible even more verbose and circumspect back then.

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#27

Post by johnflan » Mon, Aug 21, 2017, 10:10 AM UTC

> I decided Scala made it too easy to write code unreadable for most developers

As a side note, this seems to be the biggest detractor for Scala. Any team that I have spoken to with Scala experience seem to have had projects that went too 'Scala/functional'.

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#28

Post by _Codemonkeyism » Mon, Aug 21, 2017, 10:10 AM UTC

ojosilva wrote: post #24

I wonder why Kotlin beat Scala in this virtual programming language traction game. I don't write code for the JVM anymore, but Kotlin occupies the same space as Scala. Was it compilation speed? Corporate support?

I've been using Scala for a long time.

I would be attracted to Kotlin because IDE (Intellij) verification is very slow in Scala, compilation speed is and will be slow (really interested in efforts to reduce language scope to speed up mentioned on HN earlier), error messages in Scala are a pain.

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#29

Post by RandyRanderson » Mon, Aug 21, 2017, 10:17 AM UTC

I remember reading so many headlines like "email is dead" over the years. Email is not dead according to every pop-over i see but all those 'replacements' are.

There are very, very few technologies that are 'winners' (pick your own meaning) in the long run. Choose wisely.

Re: Rise and fall of JVM languages

#30

Post by izacus » Mon, Aug 21, 2017, 10:17 AM UTC

ojosilva wrote: post #24

I wonder why Kotlin beat Scala in this virtual programming language traction game. I don't write code for the JVM anymore, but Kotlin occupies the same space as Scala. Was it compilation speed? Corporate support?

Probably because it was built to seamlessly interoperate with existing Java code and targeted JVM 6 compatibility (it was built to make development of IntelliJ IDEs simpler which had to run on Java 6 VMs and which already had a lot of code written in Java).

As such it turned out to be a natural fit for Android apps as well, because the platform has pretty much the same type of limitations.

Other nice things: - Standard library is tiny so you don't get a large app size and method count hit. - The datastructures are fully interoperable with Java ones so calling out to existing Java libraries and code feels completely natural. I need to stress how important this is - you can just drop Kotlin classes into existing codebase and things will just work and look natural. - The language itself it very easy to pick up - it fixes A LOT of Java pain points, but it doesn't really try to change fundamental paradigms. Which means that pretty much any Java developer can quickly become productive in it. - The IDE support it superb and practically on the same level as Java. - The compiler is fast enough and good enough.