Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple deprecates Java

developer.apple.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 277 posts

Re: Apple deprecates Java

#141

Post by Tamerlin »

masklinn wrote: post #99
rbanffy wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clang/LLVM is BSD while GCC is GPL. That means Apple can extend them all they want without ever giving you, or their competition, any sources. If they ever perceive a threat from their competition, Clang/LLVM provides a lot more maneuvering space than GCC ever would. And yes, GCC is a very hard thing to integrate into tools and it's that way by design.

> That means Apple can extend them all they want without ever giving you, or their competition, any sources. It mostly means that they can use the libraries without having to open-source Xcode itself. A compiler is not exactly a competitive advantage for a company as big as Apple. > And yes, GCC is a very hard thing to integrate into tools and it's that way by design. Uh yes and?

"A compiler is not exactly a competitive advantage for a company as big as Apple."

Apple might not make money directly with its compiler, but for its 3rd party developers to be stuck with a mediocre compiler is definitely a disadvantage for Apple.

Hypothetical: The hardware under the hood is identical to that of a Dell. Compare an application written for both, but the one running on the Dell uses Intel's highly optimized compiler while Apple uses one that's not tuned for any particular platform, and therefore performs somewhat poorly on x86.

Result: Apple has a 20% performance deficit.

Now say that application is Photorealistic RenderMan or Cinema4D or Modo.

That 20% performance deficit, that has nothing to do with the hardware, just created a significant cost disadvantage for a mac user -- to implement a renderfarm, the mac adds either 20% in rendering time, or 20% in extra hardware costs to offset the rendering time (which ends up costing more still in logistics).

Result? Apple would lose a potentially non-trivial sale.

Having an optimized in-house compiler would probably also help to improve OpenGL performance on the mac -- because odds are the entire OS is compiled with the same compiler...

Though it may not be a significant direct revenue generator, having a good compiler would probably still be very beneficial for Apple AND its customers, not to mention developers.

Re: Apple deprecates Java

#142

Post by wmf »

umjames wrote: post #119
nileshk wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Eclipse is in a better position to handle this because it uses SWT instead of Swing. SWT is not produced by Apple, and uses native widgets (for OS X, there is both a Cocoa and Carbon version). So in theory, Eclipse could run on something like Soylatte without having to use X11. It's the Swing apps (such as Netbeans, etc) that are potentially in trouble. Apple has been maintaining their own code for Swing. If…

Or maybe they're not interested in being on the other end of an Oracle lawsuit. I don't know.

Apple paid for Java; they're not going to get sued.

Re: Apple deprecates Java

#143

Post by Tamerlin »

fdb wrote: post #46

So then what's the best way to do cross-platform development? For all its faults, Java does deliver something that resembles the "write once, run anywhere" dream. Any idea for a high-performance, cross-platform, native UI development stack? Is C++/Objective-C still the best option?

How about C# in the form of Mono?

Re: Apple deprecates Java

#144

Post by uriel »

slantyyz wrote: post #121
cosmicray wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that the current WebObjects license (while no longer having a licensing fee) stipulates that it should be run on Apple hardware. Some wags have speculated that it would be OK to run it on an Mac Pro even with Windows 7. I don't believe this is an immediate issue, but one that people doing long term planning should consider. If you want to write/run Java code, have at it. If you want to write something that…

It used to be cross platform. Back in the dotcom days, I was at a company that would sell implementations of it for Windows and Sun servers. That was when the software price started at 50k (iirc) though. When you're charging that kind of coin, I guess the motivation to support Windows is higher.

Java has never been cross platform. Back in the dot.bomb days running java on anything other than Windows and Solaris was a huge pain in the ass when not outright impossible, and there was Sun's infamous internal memo about how much Java on Solaris sucked!

Re: Apple deprecates Java

#145

Post by jm4 »

gaustin wrote: post #96
jm4 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but would you rather not have it at all?

Definitely. Unusable software is as bad as none at all. Unless someone is paying well, I'm not going to deal with the issues.

Umm... Just don't use it. No one is forcing you to. Some of us are happy to have it, even if it does have some quirks.

Re: Apple deprecates Java

#146

Post by bgruber »

To argue that having an Apple supported JVM was good, or that it doesn't matter because you'll just have a 3rd-party JVM instead, misses the fact that it's the change itself that will be cause the of problems. As crap as Apple's Java support has been, it was a known quantity: as a developer, you know what your Mac users have (currently it's "most have Java 6, but there are plenty of people still stuck with Java 5"). The same is true for Windows; even though the JVM comes from Sun, everyone gets that same JVM, and pretty much everyone has Java 6.

It will take some time before a new one true JVM for Mac emerges. Furthermore, Apple's wishiwashiness on the support ("may not be included") will probably inhibit development on a true replacement.

Re: Apple deprecates Java

#147

Post by Tamerlin »

nickpp wrote: post #9

Wait, I thought Oracle (Java's current owner) is Apple's friend, because of the lawsuit against Google's Android. Head spinning.

Oracle's friends are Fortune 500 executives with small minds and deep pockets. That is to say, people who are willing to shell out for Oracle products and services when there are considerably better and less expensive alternatives available.

AFAIK Oracle still charges license fees for Oracle per core, while Microsoft charges per socket. The result is a HUGE price disparity... and the less expensive product is also the one that's far easier to deploy and maintain, and has vastly superior tools for developing and optimizing code.

Honestly, I don't see how Apple would be on Oracle's radar at all, since they serve such vastly different markets.

Re: Apple deprecates Java

#148

Post by headius »

lylejohnson wrote: post #128
shimonamit wrote: post #10

Speculative, but could this be an early preventative measure to keep JRuby from challenging their up and coming MacRuby platform?

I don't believe that this is an attempt on Apple's part to hate on JRuby. I am however very curious about what impact this will have on the development of JRuby and other JVM-based languages, such as Clojure and Scala. It's no secret that a lot of folks in the (J)Ruby community work on Macs, but I think that bleeds over into the other languages' communities as well. For example, I'm pretty sure Rich Hickey uses a Mac…

We'll have to see how this plays out. It's been very nice that Java's already available on all new Macs, but then there's been the dreadfully slow progress of incorporating updates, security fixes, and so on. On the other hand, OpenJDK has been building well on OS X for some time in both 32 and 64-bit forms. The only real missing pieces are easy ways to get OpenJDK builds installed (helped by Apple's restructuring of how they configure and locate Java installs) and the Cocoa-based backend for Swing (if you're using or building GUIs).

In any case, there's lots of vectors to getting JDK/JRE on OS X, and this might actually make it easier to choose which vendor and version you want for your OS X Java install.

Re: Apple deprecates Java

#149

Post by Samuel_Michon »

krelian wrote: post #14
martey wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have not done Java development on OS X, but doesn't this mean that OS X 10.7 would not ship with a Java runtime? Wouldn't this have a negative effect on the ease of packaging and distributing Java programs on the platform?

Was Java that big on the Mac? Neither Windows nor most Linux distros ship with a Java runtime.

"Was Java that big on the Mac?"

The precursor to Mac OS X, Rhapsody, had three environments, treated as equals: classic MacOS, Java, and OPENSTEP.

Schematics here: http://macguild.org/rhapsody.html

Obviously, OPENSTEP/Yellow Box/Cocoa won out.

Re: Apple deprecates Java

#150

Post by quux »

martey wrote: post #7
jdub wrote: post #3

Note that they've only deprecated their own Java runtime .

I have not done Java development on OS X, but doesn't this mean that OS X 10.7 would not ship with a Java runtime? Wouldn't this have a negative effect on the ease of packaging and distributing Java programs on the platform?

Maybe it could be an optional install, like rosetta is on snow leopard.
Post reply on HN