HN news is about possibility, inspiration and also practical/tactical insights. Writing about the past and the maintenance of the old systems isn't all that interesting. Thus most don't want to write or read about. We all agree there are many old and once very cool tech in the wild, but I for one use HN to be inspired and jazzed about what the community on edge is doing or wanting to do. :)
IT Runs on Java 8
131–140 of 556 posts
Re: IT Runs on Java 8
#132Fun story : i had to develop the same system for two different companies, one a startup with 3 employees (the founders) , the other a billion dollar business. Just a backend api & web interface, together with an iOS app displaying the content. I could use shiny new tech for the startup (which at the time was python on app engine and its nosql datastore, with a backbone.js framework), whereas the other one forced me t…
It is not the technology which is slowing down the enterprises. That is done by processes, humans and risk.
You cannot stay up to date permanently, because that introduces risks all the time. Once you earn money, there are layers to protect the money stream.
You can loose tons of money by not staying modern, that is true. But you can loose everything when you ignore a risk. The trick is to find a balance.
And all of that is not considering investors and their idea how the money should be used.
Re: IT Runs on Java 8
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
What?
I suspect that the parent is talking about the JVM's JIT, where it compiles java bytecode into machine instructions after loading the application. This is why the first few requests on a JVM are usually considerably slower than the rest. Parent is obviously exaggerating with the 5000x, and he could have made his point in a different way, but there's some truth to it.
At the same time, JIT can outperform native code in some specific circumstances, since there are certain optimizations which can be proven safe at runtime which can not be guaranteed to be safe at compile time
Re: IT Runs on Java 8
#134The funny thing is that from a purely technological point of view, Java (even the 5-year-old Java 8 and certainly recent versions) is far ahead of most other stuff hyped on HN (as well as less hyped stuff). Virtually no other platform comes close to that combination of state-of-the-art optimizing compilers, state-of-the-art GCs, and low-overhead in-production profiling/monitoring/management. And much of the cutting-e…
For such an advanced JVM, having to prewarm it by calling code 5000x times or the JVM being much more memory hungry than other non-JVM languages doesn't feel like the cutting edge.
the usual C2 kicks-in is 10000, not 5k. But that statement about warming up is true only for microbenchmarks.
C1 which is an dumb (but not terrible) compiler tends to be at 1k, and if you cannot get your code to 1k, likely it never needs compilation, so no point to spend time and space on performing the said compilation.
The 'prewarming' does include perf. counters, so it's guided compilation to boot.
Re: IT Runs on Java 8
#135Java 8? I wish! We're mostly stuck with Java 6 and 7! :(
Re: IT Runs on Java 8
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does this compare to the .NET ecosystem?
C# is a better language. Java 8 started to catch up with some of the quality-of-live niceties, but Java has a lot of mistakes baked into the language and interfaces that can't be removed without potentially breaking a lot of stuff, which the consortium is not willing to do. C# and DotNet were designed with the wisdom gained from the early days of Java implementation and sidestepped a lot of these messes. Java has a s…
Packet is a great alternative to the NuGet client.
Tooling might be slightly behind Java's, but honestly, there's not much in it. Dotnet Core might only have been available on Linux for a few years, but Mono was around for many before that.
The dotnet CLI also recently got the concept of 'global tools', which are akin to NPMs.
A lot of work is also underway on better cross-platform performance analysis, crash dump handling and the like for runtime in production[0]
Is there anything in particular you miss?
[0] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/introducing-diagnostic...
Re: IT Runs on Java 8
#137The funny thing is that from a purely technological point of view, Java (even the 5-year-old Java 8 and certainly recent versions) is far ahead of most other stuff hyped on HN (as well as less hyped stuff). Virtually no other platform comes close to that combination of state-of-the-art optimizing compilers, state-of-the-art GCs, and low-overhead in-production profiling/monitoring/management. And much of the cutting-e…
True, but java carries a lot of legacy.
Java, or projects in Java? Java pretty much has to, in order to preserve the most important feature a runtime can have: backwards compatibility.
Projects in Java are cursed from the beginning: the language has great constructs for boxing complexity (modifiers, inheritance, interfaces, generics, design patterns allowed by performant virtual calls, etc.). This means that when projects in other languages become unmanageable, Java will keep chugging business requirements like no other. Accumulating complexity is the fate of every successful system; and Java makes you go a long way.
Now, a newly arrived person on the job market will face systems with a pile of convoluted business logic a few century.human's high. The first ticket will be: 0.5 month of getting accustomed to the language/framework, 1 month of archeology, producing 50 lines of code, 150 of tests, break a few tests, 0.5 month of corrections; For something that would take one day as a greenfield project. The job might pay well, but will be very lowly gratifying.
Now the sound enterprise strategy is to keep using Java: the platform allows for deeper and finer integration into the business processes. But the sound individual strategy for newcomers is to stay the hell away from it. Oh, you will only work with Rust/Go/Elixir/etc? Here, have a greenfield project.
Clojure/Scala/Kotlin/Ceylon/Frege/Groovy might be the best of both worlds.
Re: IT Runs on Java 8
#138The funny thing is that from a purely technological point of view, Java (even the 5-year-old Java 8 and certainly recent versions) is far ahead of most other stuff hyped on HN (as well as less hyped stuff). Virtually no other platform comes close to that combination of state-of-the-art optimizing compilers, state-of-the-art GCs, and low-overhead in-production profiling/monitoring/management. And much of the cutting-e…
True, but java carries a lot of legacy.
"Legacy" includes good things too, not just bad things.
I grew up promising myself that I'd never touch Java, but when I did, it was a relevation. Everything just works. The debugger was just "attach and go" -- no recompilation with different flags, no fishing for the IDE / plugin version in which it wasn't broken, no glaring missing features (conditional breakpoints, stack traces...) The frameworks were refreshingly complete; I always felt that extensibility mechanisms were available so that I didn't have to gamble that my requirements fell into the "just works" subset rather than the "just doesn't" subset. I never had to wonder if integrating with some bog-standard protocol would mean maintaining my own open source project; maven always had something workable available.
Java wasn't born like this, but the legacy it accumulated made it formidable.
Early-adopting a hip language nets you a few sexy wins at the cost of completely eliminating a gigantic Brontosaurus-size long tail of important functionality and ecosystem maturity.
Re: IT Runs on Java 8
#139It's a bit disturbing how much people in this industry are focused on tooling. It's a biproduct IMO of working on boring problems or supporting morally ambiguous corps. That thing that you need to keep yourself busy and keep going in the rat race.
Geeze... the contemporary Internet, man. Ten years ago, we flamed each other over our personal preferences, and others' views were "stupid". Today, we flame on about our personal preferences, and others are implied to be "immoral". Both exercises are admittedly immature, but at the least the former was more cheeky and not so up its own posterior.
Yes, tooling is a huge deal in day-to-day life. When I think about drains on my time and productivity, I've never been too setback by having to deal with a "for" loop instead of something more monadic. However, I HAVE spent days doing painful refactoring work, that could have been done in minutes with a few right-clicks in an IDE. Build tools and CI/CD pipelines, profiling and troubleshooting tools, etc etc etc.
I can't believe that any of this stuff requires defending oneself from having "sold out to The Man".
Re: IT Runs on Java 8
#140The funny thing is that from a purely technological point of view, Java (even the 5-year-old Java 8 and certainly recent versions) is far ahead of most other stuff hyped on HN (as well as less hyped stuff). Virtually no other platform comes close to that combination of state-of-the-art optimizing compilers, state-of-the-art GCs, and low-overhead in-production profiling/monitoring/management. And much of the cutting-e…
This. Technically there is nothing I don't like about JVM right now, everything that seems impossible 15 years ago is now solved. AOT used to be bag of hurt with GCJ ( I know I could use Excelsior, not sure if it was free in my time though ), but now even that will be an supported option from Graal.
Java the languages still isn't pretty, but it has been much improved.
OpenJDK is GPL and apart form the trademark ( ? ) with Java ( I didn't read much into the JakartaEE problem, ) everything should be fine. I am just a little uneasy with Oracle lurking around, I just don't know what they are going to do next.