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Does this mean that the value of these additions are partially diminished because of spectre and meltdown vulnerability fixes?
That isn't to say the designers of JavaScript and C# don't think carefully about the addition of new features; indeed, was it Anders Heljsberg who made the point about all new proposed features starting with negative points?
But Java's recent and upcoming additions show _taste_: adopting a single lambda notation that fitted smoothly with the surrounding class-based OOP paradigm via SAM types (rather than magically-generated-type-style lambdas succeeding two overlapping "delegate"/"event"-like features); implementing (sadly somewhat-incompatible) modules that can curtail unbounded reflection, opening the door to greater reasonability and performance in the future; proposing Project Loom to avoid the async/sync API split that hit Python, C#, and even Kotlin Coroutines; and now Valhalla, which was quietly mulled on for years before arriving at this very reasonable solution that considers myriad angles.
I like this approach to language design and think it bodes well for the language's future. It's a sweet spot between being necessarily conservative, dealing with developers' real-world problems, and giving time to mull over new language feature designs and not just implementing as soon (and haphazardly) as possible to please vocal developers.
> With the multi-level memory caches and instruction-level parallelism of today’s CPUs, a single cache miss may cost as much as 1000 arithmetic issue slots – a huge increase in relative cost. Does this mean that the value of these additions are partially diminished because of spectre and meltdown vulnerability fixes?
This is nothing to do with specular execution.
While Java's slow and cautious evolution frustrates developers, it still arguably demonstrates longer-term thinking than the constant accrual of features in its contemporaries such as JavaScript and C#. That isn't to say the designers of JavaScript and C# don't think carefully about the addition of new features; indeed, was it Anders Heljsberg who made the point about all new proposed features starting with negative…
It's implemented features Java had just gotten much earlier, in much more useful forms (see: generics, lambdas) without them being "haphazard" about it.
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To me tasteful is what C# did, breaking changes when needed, but only when so much value was added no one could be upset with the result.
It takes way more effort, and way more carefulness than "we're going to move at glacial pace and provide half-hearted features in the name of backwards compatibility" (again, see: lambdas and generics)
While Java's slow and cautious evolution frustrates developers, it still arguably demonstrates longer-term thinking than the constant accrual of features in its contemporaries such as JavaScript and C#. That isn't to say the designers of JavaScript and C# don't think carefully about the addition of new features; indeed, was it Anders Heljsberg who made the point about all new proposed features starting with negative…
There is really no good excuse. Many developers have abandoned java due to the glacial progress with both the language and the VM. It is legacy now.
The main benefit (IMO) of Vahala would be for other JVM languages (such as Kotlin) to make the implementation of value types more efficient.
(I use both CLR and JVM in my work, but is clear to me that the CLR is superior on many fronts).
While Java's slow and cautious evolution frustrates developers, it still arguably demonstrates longer-term thinking than the constant accrual of features in its contemporaries such as JavaScript and C#. That isn't to say the designers of JavaScript and C# don't think carefully about the addition of new features; indeed, was it Anders Heljsberg who made the point about all new proposed features starting with negative…
I would agree with this if C# didn't definitively show you can have a successful enterprise/"LTS" language that doesn't move at a glacial pace and spend several years doing little to nothing (pre Java 8) It's implemented features Java had just gotten much earlier, in much more useful forms (see: generics, lambdas) without them being "haphazard" about it. - To me tasteful is what C# did, breaking changes when needed,…
* Too many overlapping concepts for referring to code by value and defining them inline: events, delegates, anonymous delegates, and lambdas.
* Lambdas that generate magic types rather than slotting into SAM types. This works great for functional languages, sure, but doesn't fit well into a class-based OOP language.
* `ref` and `out` parameters to appease archaic COM APIs.
* Tuple unpacking, which makes sense independently but then bizzarely tries to integrate with `out` parameters.
* A nice "ex nihlo" object literal syntax that shoots itself in the foot by undermining immutability due to requiring settable fields. (TBF, later versions fixed this IIRC.)
* Inline functions in methods in a language that already has lambdas and methods; it's just bloat.
* `as` casting that yields nulls. Did it really need a whole new syntax just to handle null more concisely specifically for casting?
* `partial` classes. Encouraging even more code generation with features like this is a questionable idea and wasn't necessary in other languages.
* `dynamic`. Even if there are use cases for it, it's strange in an otherwise static language with a top-level Object type anyway. I'm saying this as someone who's perfectly happy with fully dynamic languages like Erlang and Lisp. I just don't see the point of adding it to C# specifically.
* C-style enumerations.
* Properties. Invoking side-effects on something that is syntactically indistinguishable from an attribute read is a bad idea. Auto-generation of Java's verbose getters would be long overdue, but the caller site shouldn't be the same a la C#.
* Extension methods. It seems quite ad hoc compared to static addition of types to common operations in other languages, like imported traits in Rust or typeclasses in Haskell.
* Proposed "shapes". Looks like a good idea by itself but will overlap too much with default method implementation and other existing mechanisms.
* Interfaces prefixed with `I`. Not strictly a language problem but an ecosystem one. I shouldn't need to know what _sort_ of type I'm dealing with, that's '90s Hungarian notation.
* Nullable reference types. Getting rid of null is good, but this proposal became confusing. They mentioned opting in assembly-wide for a while but there was then a conversation about having it just warn in some cases. I need to read the latest literature around this, but it seemed less elegant than Java just adding a monad-like Optional type and not adding loads of special-case operations with question marks everywhere.
Despite this, I still admire a lot of the design decisions behind C#. LINQ was great. `async/await`, despite my belief of its inferiority to Goroutines/Project Loom/Erlang processes, was still a great innovation from Midiori at the time. Value types were obviously right to be implemented early on. Assemblies were a good idea. Private by default rather than package-accessibility was a nice touch, as was the `override` keyword. The C# team are smart people who know what they are doing!
As an aside, I used to be firmly against erased generics, but reading more about the tradeoffs from the likes of Gilad Bracha has caused me to reconsider.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would agree with this if C# didn't definitively show you can have a successful enterprise/"LTS" language that doesn't move at a glacial pace and spend several years doing little to nothing (pre Java 8) It's implemented features Java had just gotten much earlier, in much more useful forms (see: generics, lambdas) without them being "haphazard" about it. - To me tasteful is what C# did, breaking changes when needed,…
These C# issues arguably demonstrate haphazard additions that didn't align with good taste: * Too many overlapping concepts for referring to code by value and defining them inline: events, delegates, anonymous delegates, and lambdas. * Lambdas that generate magic types rather than slotting into SAM types. This works great for functional languages, sure, but doesn't fit well into a class-based OOP language. * `ref` an…
From implying that C# lambdas are not infinitely more useful, powerful, and intuitive than "functional interfaces"
To the issues implying Properties are bad compared to the completely and utterly ridiculous situation in Java (which is exactly how they're implemented in Kotlin by the way).
And your "critique" of "dynamic", do you even know what it's for or how it works? Go read up on what the "DLR" is
You seem to have fundamental issues with the fact C# goes for being a useful language for it's users over being Java. Half your reasons are literally "it doesn't do it how Java does" or "it does X but Java doesn't so X is bad". The other half are complaints about insanely powerful features C# has that have minor issues that in no way take away from the fact.. they're incredibly powerful and useful features.
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To me the moment you're trying to defend Java generics and type erasure, vs C# which paid the price early and has reaped the rewards for years, you should already you're on the wrong side of things...
I wonder if they plan to support nested inline types, such as arrays inside objects, or arrays in arrays. Every time I try to design a layout something like that I end up having to compute values to initialize various offsets with. Arrays may have a length prefix, or objects may need some metadata in the header. Tagged unions may need to initialize tags.