Java is still available at zero-cost • Hacker News Board

Re: Java is still available at zero-cost

#141

Post by Recurecur » Fri, Aug 31, 2018, 12:31 PM UTC

majewsky wrote: post #131

eftychis wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go is kind of special, as it is new relatively and the initial implementation of every feature is usually the most basic possible. Thus, every new version there is space for a lot of improvements. What I mean: the garbage collector is/was for all intents and purposes Dijkstra's late 70s ('78) tricolor algorithm. They eliminated re-scanning of the stack on Go 1.7 by adding a hybrid write barrier which is 90's work (fo…

> So Go is by no means state-of-the-art performance wise. Yet Go is blazingly fast compared to most other languages that are widely used for web server development (except, maybe, Java).

Well, that's a heavily caveated statement.

It seems, given the end of Moore's "Law", as well as environmental concerns, that language efficiency will get more attention. It'll be interesting to see if languages like Swift, Rust, and Julia can gain traction for web development.

I wonder how uptake has been for IBM Kitura so far...

Re: Java is still available at zero-cost

#142

Post by tonyedgecombe » Fri, Aug 31, 2018, 12:43 PM UTC

latchkey wrote: post #84

MBCook wrote: post #35

I 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…

Waiting 6 months also does not make much sense when it comes to security patches. It seems like spending time to engineer processes to allow faster upgrades (CI/CD deployments is one popular route), would be a worthwhile investment.

It's hard to underestimate how fragile some enterprise projects are, no unit tests, no CI, dependencies on an unknown number of 3rd party components, the original developers left years ago and so on.

Re: Java is still available at zero-cost

#143

Post by MBCook » Fri, Aug 31, 2018, 1:20 PM UTC

jerven wrote: post #129

MBCook wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that Open JDK is where all Java language development takes place now. It’s only some special enterprise features that aren’t part of the language itself that are restricted to the paid version of the Oracle JDK.

Were (past tense) there is nothing in Oracle JDK 11 that is not in OpenJDK 11.

Oh, I thought there might still be some high end EE stuff.

Thanks for the clarification.

Re: Java is still available at zero-cost

#144

Post by shados » Fri, Aug 31, 2018, 1:21 PM UTC

no_wizard wrote: post #105

gear54rus wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a bit dangerous. There's good in both functional approach and type systems but I'd rather see them where they are - in TypeScript and lodash and have vanilla be as vanilla as possible. Time will tell, there's already been a case where things from framework were pulled into ES (coffeescript).

I’m curious what you mean by dangerous? I’m having trouble discerning what you mean. If you mean going into a functional paradigm I’d say it’s definitely a matter if taste. However my biggest gripe is that the ECMAScript board seems intent on being all things to all people. So they half implemented classes. And they added some neat data types. But god for bid you want to override their constructors yet if I make a cl…

> Also decorators are only for classes? Why does that make any sense?

The generally thought is that you technically only need them for classes (and really, only for class members and properties). For anything else you can just use a higher order function. Not as pretty, but JS decorator arent about syntax sugar, they're about filling one of the bazillion gaps in the language that opens when you introduce a class keyword.

Of course, the spec for decorator has been thrown away and started over once already (so basically no one using typescript/angular/mobx/whatever with decorators are actually spec compliant these days), and the new spec has been in limbo for years. Decorators aren't part of JS at all right now.

Re: Java is still available at zero-cost

#145

Post by nextlittleowl » Fri, Aug 31, 2018, 1:34 PM UTC

tannhaeuser wrote: post #104

scarface74 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.Net Core. It’s maintained by a company that actually knows how to support a platform.

The alternative is, and always has been, a language and runtime lib that is spec'd in the open and has multiple implementations to choose from. Though choices have become limited. Only C, C++, and JavaScript seem to fit the bill AFAICS.

Or LISP.

Re: Java is still available at zero-cost

#146

Post by TheCoelacanth » Fri, Aug 31, 2018, 1:59 PM UTC

euske wrote: post #43

Honest 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…

Not upgrading your language every time a stable version is released seems crazy to me.

Eventually you are going to have to upgrade, and if you are 10 years behind it's going to be a huge, painful migration. If you upgrade every six months, each upgrade is easy and barely noticeable.

What you are doing seems to me like deciding not to change the oil in your car. You might save you a bit in the short term, but it could come back to hurt you in a big way.

Re: Java is still available at zero-cost

#147

Post by tveita » Fri, Aug 31, 2018, 2:17 PM UTC

didip wrote: post #15

I am not well-verse in Java world and curious about one thing. The valuable part of Oracle JDK is the GC. For example G1 is only going to be available on OpenJDK 9. What if there's a new GC being developed, will OpenJDK have the new GC?

G1 works fine on OpenJDK 8, you just have to pass the command line parameters to enable it. It was made the defaultin OpenJDK 9.

Re: Java is still available at zero-cost

#148

Post by matheusmoreira » Fri, Aug 31, 2018, 3:08 PM UTC

gear54rus wrote: post #90

shados wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the JavaScript world people use those holiday chocolate calendar things to count the days until a new version of their favorite compiler will come out and can't sleep the night before because they want to be sure they can update at the very instant the release is dropped (and then proceed to complain that their favorite framework didn't update for the quirks of the new compiler in a timely manner). I wish I was co…

Yep, and that's why JS is moving and everyone else is biting the dust lol. Progress needs to be made and those who can't follow don't have the right to complain really. Old tools are always available because language compatibility is preserved (which, imo should also be dropped, we would have much better language as a result). We also stick to LTS (in my case node LTS)

> which, imo should also be dropped, we would have much better language as a result

This just creates two different languages. The older language only dies when everyone stops using it. The Ruby community managed to do that with 1.9 but Python 2 still exists alongside Python 3.

Re: Java is still available at zero-cost

#149

Post by mamcx » Fri, Aug 31, 2018, 3:44 PM UTC

orbitingpluto wrote: post #124

mamcx wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was burned, badly, when try to port a huge ERP from .NET 1.1 to 2.? (if I remember the numbers correctly). Other projects get the slowdon, but that was truly a nightmare. That my brain trauma make forget much of it. After that, I move very very fast. I prefer to hit "small" pains in short-term that try to do a huge jump later. This mean that as long as I'm coding in a project (I'm contractor and do freelancing) I u…

That is bonkers that someone signed off on a huge project with .NET 1.1. Early .NET is so off. It feels like two teams of programmers at Microsoft weren't talking to each other but working on features for the same language.

Back in the day, MS was the gospel in my country (Colombia). We take everything them say, expect programming in Visual C++.

Re: Java is still available at zero-cost

#150

Post by wheresvic1 » Fri, Aug 31, 2018, 6:30 PM UTC

Kudos to RH. Here's hoping that we don't have to keep adding JIRA issues to update Java every 6 months. I have enough of this on the Javascript side as it is..