What does this mean for me as an engineer who writes Java every day?
Use openjdk instead. By default on linux, that's what will continue to happen. You won't really be impacted by this.
Java is still available at zero-cost
41–50 of 164 posts
Re: Java is still available at zero-cost
#42I have a friend working at a company that is having “very important” discussions about this. They need to keep up with security patches (for obvious reasons) but the six month limit has them scared. The consensus seems to be that they don’t believe they can keep up with an upgrade schedule that fast and are thus forced to pay for support from someone or hope that the community backports security fixes far enough for…
What's being missed here is there is a whole slew of vendors that support openjdk. Those patches will come from red hat, ibm, azul,.. as well.
Re: Java is still available at zero-cost
#43Honest question: How often do people upgrade their production language?
Me: once in a decade, maybe. I'm still perfectly happy (and productive) with C# 3.5, Java 7 and Python 2. I'm grudgingly moving forward because the old toolchains are being deprecated now, but my codes aren't significantly improved because of a few fancy idioms available in a new language, and it barely affects the design decisions. Upgrading your library or framework can be more often, but I tend to still be fairly conservative. Upgrading your language for production twice a year sounds crazy to me.
Re: Java is still available at zero-cost
#44Up until around 2008, clock speed was increasing rapidly and the bottleneck to systems performance kept changing. Software was being obsoleted in a mater of years. Then things started changing; evidenced perhaps by Windows upgrades suddenly becoming a lot less relevant and Apple starting to steamroll more modular computer builders like Dell. Mark my words, there will come a day where continuously upgrading software w…
Eh, I think we got some time for consumer performance improvements. Graphics cards and HDD/SSDs seem to have been steadily increasing (noticeably) but CPU's and RAM have not for consumers which are major bottlenecks.
My top of the line late 2013 rMBP has got 4 cores, 16GB of ram, and 512GB NVMe SSD. rMBPs just recently upgraded to 6 cores and 32GB of ram (more storage too but that isn't a big deal nowadays since speed was the biggest optimization for storage and it is still NVMe IMO). However, server CPU and RAM has increased. You can now rent an AWS x1e.32xlarge with 64 cores and 4TB of RAM and thanks to AMD, that competition seems to finally be flowing back to consumer computers (At least for CPUs).
Just look at people being amazed at threadrippers 32 freaking cores on a desktop (matches AWS x1 when you consider the x1 has dual sockets) and we still haven't passed down the gains in RAM (2TB of RAM if it matches the x1).
When those performance gains pass down to consumer computers, users will have up to 6.33 times the amount of CPU and 64 freaking times the amount of RAM!
Re: Java is still available at zero-cost
#45I have a friend working at a company that is having “very important” discussions about this. They need to keep up with security patches (for obvious reasons) but the six month limit has them scared. The consensus seems to be that they don’t believe they can keep up with an upgrade schedule that fast and are thus forced to pay for support from someone or hope that the community backports security fixes far enough for…
I am not sure I completely understand the implications of this. But, if OpenJDK is the reference implementation, and as long as someone is going to maintain Java 11, there really isn't much to worry. I worked for a company that completely relies on Java. They also relied on Apache, so they had on their roles two developers that wrote code for Apache and Tomcat. Making wild guesses here but - if OpenJDK project gets 300 companies with one contributor each to write code for them, they will continue supporting Java 11. Maintaining Java is in some way a responsibility of every company that benefits from it. Or maybe I am so out of touch with technology that I am absolutely wrong.
Re: Java is still available at zero-cost
#46Honest question: How often do people upgrade their production language? Me: once in a decade, maybe. I'm still perfectly happy (and productive) with C# 3.5, Java 7 and Python 2. I'm grudgingly moving forward because the old toolchains are being deprecated now, but my codes aren't significantly improved because of a few fancy idioms available in a new language, and it barely affects the design decisions. Upgrading you…
With Go: every release. Free performance improvements and backwards compatibility. It also doesn't require anything installed on the server, so it's just updating a ci script.
Re: Java is still available at zero-cost
#47If Java is open and free, then why did Android decide to rewrite Java? I notice a lot of companies seem to avoid Java so there must be some sort of a catch.
Android is quickly moving away from Java to make Kotlin the default language nowadays, it's probably in part due to the Java lawsuit (and in part to add language features quicker without changing the VM).
Re: Java is still available at zero-cost
#48Honest question: How often do people upgrade their production language? Me: once in a decade, maybe. I'm still perfectly happy (and productive) with C# 3.5, Java 7 and Python 2. I'm grudgingly moving forward because the old toolchains are being deprecated now, but my codes aren't significantly improved because of a few fancy idioms available in a new language, and it barely affects the design decisions. Upgrading you…
With Go: every release. Free performance improvements and backwards compatibility. It also doesn't require anything installed on the server, so it's just updating a ci script.
Same for us for Go. The releases have never caused any trouble and the performance improvements are nice to have. For us it’s just changing one base containers version.
That being said we still use mostly Python 2 for our Python services.
Re: Java is still available at zero-cost
#49Honest question: How often do people upgrade their production language? Me: once in a decade, maybe. I'm still perfectly happy (and productive) with C# 3.5, Java 7 and Python 2. I'm grudgingly moving forward because the old toolchains are being deprecated now, but my codes aren't significantly improved because of a few fancy idioms available in a new language, and it barely affects the design decisions. Upgrading you…
Imagine you are a software developer that sells a hospital management system built on Java. You need to prove your software is built on secure technology. So if you are using Java 11, and suppose it is known that there are no more security updates, you cannot claim security.
What I understand from the article - Oracle is not supporting it Oracle 11 after 6 months, but other still will, so nothing to worry about.
Re: Java is still available at zero-cost
#50> Build OpenJDK yourself. [...] I suspect this not a very realistic choice for most companies.
Are they saying that most firms don't have the ability to build software themselves, or is this a situation particular to Java where they don't backport security patches and most firms aren't on the latest major?