IT Runs on Java 8 • Hacker News Board

Re: IT Runs on Java 8

#341

Post by btilly » Fri, May 10, 2019, 11:45 PM UTC

kiriakasis wrote: post #328

btilly wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please double check my wording. Yes, you can write a non-trivial .NET application on Linux. But if you take a non-trivial .NET application that runs on Windows, the odds are low that it can easily be ported to Linux. And there are almost no non-trivial .NET applications that weren't originally written for Windows. The result is that if you work with .NET, you're going to be pushed towards Windows.

It the wording of the announcement (taking them in good faith) that applies to applications using .NET Framework. .NET Core should be 100% portable to Linux/Mac/wasm. .NET 5 should supersede both Core and Framework IIRC

I have been hearing announcements about how Microsoft was working to make .NET code portable ever since Mono was first started in 2001.

In the years since, I've encountered many stories that attempted to make use of that portability. All failed.

I've seen the promise of portability with other software stacks, and know how hard it is. I also know that taking software that was not written to be portable, and then making it portable, is massively harder than writing it to be portable from scratch.

So, based on both the history of .NET and general knowledge, I won't believe that .NET will actually wind up being portable until I hear stories in the wild of people porting non-trivial projects to Linux with success. And I will discount all announcements that suggest the contrary.

Re: IT Runs on Java 8

#342

Post by jacques_chester » Fri, May 10, 2019, 11:46 PM UTC

sonnyblarney wrote: post #222

todd3834 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Sun might have wanted to sue Google? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10951407

Yes, thanks for that, it stirred my recollection as I actually bumped into Jon Swartz by accident just in that era. I don't think it was money, so much as the established culture at Sun (i.e. James Gosling: "Sun is not so much a company but a debating society). A more aggressive CEO/leadership/culture would have maybe raised the money to take on Google, or to take another tact. So while you are right - and thanks for…

I've been saying for years that Pivotal Labs is a debating club that produces code as a by-product. But now I'm wondering if I read the Gosling quip and then forgot I had.

Re: IT Runs on Java 8

#343

Post by jacques_chester » Fri, May 10, 2019, 11:49 PM UTC

overgard wrote: post #314

pron wrote: post #85

The 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…

I used to be a Java hater (I'm much more neutral now -- I even find aspects of it pretty pleasant). To me, it was never about the technology of Java (always been pretty impressive), or even the language (a little verbose -- but so is C++ and C# and I like both of those), it was really just about the ecosystem. For whatever reason 2000s era java had soo many libraries that were just insanely over-engineered and had th…

A lot of the improvements in the ecosystem came from improvements in the language. Go4 patterns are in part shaped by language.

Re: IT Runs on Java 8

#344

Post by jacques_chester » Fri, May 10, 2019, 11:51 PM UTC

pcwalton wrote: post #298

tomohawk wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It takes a lot of power to push something that large. A lot of brain power to grock the ecosystem. Outside of the Java bubble, the view is quite a bit different. All that sophistication looks like a wasted effort. Take something as simple as admining the garbage collector. Java has a big selection of GCs, and each has their bunch of knobs for tuning. And you have to pay attention to that stuff. After working with Go…

Java HotSpot's garbage collector is significantly better for most workloads than that of Go, because it takes throughput into account, not just latency. Mike Hearn makes the point at length in this article: https://blog.plan99.net/modern-garbage-collection-911ef4f8bd... I predict that over time Go's GC will evolve to become very similar to the modern GCs that Java HotSpot has. Not having generational GC was an intere…

> I predict that over time Go's GC will evolve to become very similar to the modern GCs that Java HotSpot has.

At which time the talking point will become "look how advanced and sophisticated it is!"

Re: IT Runs on Java 8

#345

Post by gliop » Fri, May 10, 2019, 11:53 PM UTC

pron wrote: post #280

kllrnohj wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Technically there is nothing I don't like about JVM right now, everything that seems impossible 15 years ago is now solved. Value types are a major missing piece in the JVM stack right now. It's at least on the roadmap, but it keeps getting pushed back and back and back. I'd also argue runtime generics is another one, and perhaps more depressingly one that is unlikely to ever get fixed. .NET has both of them and al…

> .NET has both of them I'll give you value types, but reified generics in .NET were a mistake. It really makes interop and code sharing among languages hard, in exchange for a rather slight added convenience. This means that if you're a language implementor and you're targeting .NET, you'll get much less from the platform than you would if you target Java, which makes .NET not a very appealing common language runtim…

Is a value type different from a value class?

https://github.com/google/auto/blob/master/value/userguide/i...

Re: IT Runs on Java 8

#346

Post by jacques_chester » Fri, May 10, 2019, 11:55 PM UTC

lenkite wrote: post #256

jjjensen90 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious to hear what specifically is too bloated in Spring Boot in your opinion for container based microservices. I've been writing microservices that run in docker in Java for a few years, then moved to Kotlin recently, all using Spring Boot, and I haven't run into anything that made me feel like they were bloated. I've also written Go and Node microservices for contrast.

Spring boot has a large startup time, heavy dependency trail and a lot of dynamic class-loading based off auto-configuration. This makes it un-suitable for some areas: if you desire fast scaling micro-services that respond quickly to incoming load. Or say you want to transform your micro-service to a server-less function. One can do that with Graal VM to compile your micro-service to a single binary with microscopic…

Spring Boot does what it's asked to do, which is to load everything it finds. The dynamic class work has basically nil effect on load time. The core performance constraint is that classes are loaded essentially linearly. If you ship with something enormous like Hibernate, that's thousands of files read individually from a zipfile.

Spring folks are actively involved with Graal. I see a lot of excitement internally at Pivotal. Watch this space.

Re: IT Runs on Java 8

#347

Post by gliop » Fri, May 10, 2019, 11:56 PM UTC

btilly wrote: post #332

pron wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the executives who care nothing about open source are firmly in control, and some day may try to assert their control in ways that nobody else likes. I have no idea what Oracle may do tomorrow, but Oracle has been in control of Java for a decade, and what it has actually done is 1. significantly increase the investment in the platform and 2. open source the entire JDK. So I don't know about the next ten years, but…

Your opinion is your opinion. My opinion of the company and its products is more consistently negative than any other large company. And while you think that the non-Java world is suffering, I think you have some tunnel vision. Let's just say that I am personally happy with my decision to stay away from Java. And the brief periods where I had to work with Java were misery. Languages have personalities as well as comp…

Startups don't use Java because Java is for large-scale stable long- lived enterprises, not for prototyping simple small web apps that might be thrown away in a couple of years.

Re: IT Runs on Java 8

#348

Post by sporkland » Fri, May 10, 2019, 11:57 PM UTC

pron wrote: post #280

kllrnohj wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Technically there is nothing I don't like about JVM right now, everything that seems impossible 15 years ago is now solved. Value types are a major missing piece in the JVM stack right now. It's at least on the roadmap, but it keeps getting pushed back and back and back. I'd also argue runtime generics is another one, and perhaps more depressingly one that is unlikely to ever get fixed. .NET has both of them and al…

> .NET has both of them I'll give you value types, but reified generics in .NET were a mistake. It really makes interop and code sharing among languages hard, in exchange for a rather slight added convenience. This means that if you're a language implementor and you're targeting .NET, you'll get much less from the platform than you would if you target Java, which makes .NET not a very appealing common language runtim…

Dumb question. Why do reified generics make interop challenging? Or is it reified generics plus value types that don't inherit system.Object? Couldn't the language implementations basically pass around ICollection in .NET somewhat similar to how they do in Java?

Re: IT Runs on Java 8

#349

Post by ivan_gammel » Fri, May 10, 2019, 11:58 PM UTC

chvid wrote: post #190

paulmd wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The JVM has multiple languages such as Kotlin, Scala and Groovy. Each of them arguably being a better language than Java. That most people still prefer to build projects in Java shows that other things such as backward compability, how many developers know the language, tool chain and so on matters more than the isolated technical merits of the language.

Cannot agree more. Syntactic sugar or certain more advanced constructs in the end have very low ROI for experienced developers, which can utilize very well the existing language features and extend their expressive power with internal DSLs. The costs associated with the tooling, hiring people with necessary expertise etc at that point are more important.

Re: IT Runs on Java 8

#350

Post by gliop » Sat, May 11, 2019, 12:00 AM UTC

sonnyblarney wrote: post #197

pron wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am just a little uneasy with Oracle lurking around, I just don't know what they are going to do next. What do you mean by "lurking"? Oracle is the company developing OpenJDK, and it will continue to do so. All our projects are done in the open, with lots of communication.

Oracle has a long track record of Sales & Marketing tactics which we can use as a reliable benchmark to predict outcomes. Oracle will likely pursue the most aggressive strategy they can get away with Java. I don't believe Sun was suing Google, but Oracle did. The fact that Google is switching to Kotlin is mostly a means to absolve themselves of the 'Oracle risk' - it's a big change surely, a decision not taken lightl…

Google made $billions from Java while Sun went near bankrupt, and is now a top-10 wealthiest company in USA. Oracle trying to get $ from Google in partnership with the former Sun is a different issue from your company's risk.