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A categorized list of all Java and JVM features since JDK 8 to 16

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Re: A categorized list of all Java and JVM features since JDK 8 to 16

#91

Post by pimlottc »

I’ve always admired Java for managing to slowly but surely move the language forward while maintaining backwards compatibility and keeping the community together. When you look at how many other languages have faltered and lost momentum due to transition issues (Perl 6, Python 2/3), it really shows have difficult of a task it is.

Progress can seem glacially slow at times - it’s always disappointing to see your favorite upcoming feature get pushed to a later release - but the current language is undeniably light years better than what we started with.

Respect.

Re: A categorized list of all Java and JVM features since JDK 8 to 16

#92

Post by kaba0 »

cpleppert wrote: post #60
crudbug wrote: post #8

Waiting for project loom [1] [1] https://openjdk.java.net/projects/loom/

Worth keeping in mind that the implementation they have chosen of stack copying from the heap has a larger performance overhead than something like Go which was designed around green threads/fibers/virtual threads/ etc. from the start. If you can keep your stack size very low in each task then this probably won’t be noticeable if you are doing lots of IO which can trigger wakeups. More of a replacement for an async/a…

The technical details are way out of my league, but I remember reading that stack copying can be made really cheap somehow? Perhaps due to the JVM having more abstraction below a virtual thread than Go?

Re: A categorized list of all Java and JVM features since JDK 8 to 16

#93

Post by ragnese »

Thaxll wrote: post #84
voidfunc wrote: post #13

Java gets a bad rap from people that used it late 90's through early 2000's and got burned out by XML and design pattern heavy frameworks but its a lovely language that with a little discipline can be used to create very lean looking code. Go is one of the HN darling languages and I work in Go everyday for work (and generally like it), but I really wish I could reach for Java most days.

"Go is one of the HN darling languages" It's def not the case, I spend too much time here and on Reddit and people are always complaining about Go ( generics, errors, type system etc ... ), if you want the godly language it would be Rust, anything about Rust will be upvoted. As for Java, it's a good language / runtime that is overly complicated behind layers of abstraction. Take Spring for examnple, magic everywhere,…

The hype around Rust is largely justified. There. I said it.

Rust is nowhere near perfect. It's also supposed to be a systems language- it was probably not originally intended to replace languages like Java for general "app" development.

But it's so much better of a language than most of the higher level languages you see in popular use: Java, PHP, JavaScript, Python, etc, that people are actually willing to deal with the lack of garbage collection just to get to use its excellent type system and well-designed standard library API. I think that says a lot about Rust and the programming language environment today.

Re: A categorized list of all Java and JVM features since JDK 8 to 16

#94

Post by kaba0 »

zodiakzz wrote: post #15

Is it in the realm of possibilities that Java will someday have runtime generics support (instead of type erasure)? It's the most frustrating aspect of the language because you can't use basic Java features like method overloading with them. Also, I don't understand how people use the `Optional `..? Is there a way to use method overloading with it? `ErasedType` could be _anything_ at runtime, doesn't sound fun. Besid…

When exactly would you benefit from overloading based on a generic type? How come it is never brought up with Haskell for example, or the other majority of languages that employ type erasure?

Re: A categorized list of all Java and JVM features since JDK 8 to 16

#95

Post by aphexairlines »

forty wrote: post #82

What's the best way to run java apps in a container nowadays? The official openjdk images are based on "oracle Linux" and that doesn't sound right :) is there good small and well supported java image based on a popular distribution?

Use jib (java image builder) with maven or gradle and it will build an image with distroless-java plus your app:

https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/jib https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless/blob/mast...

Re: A categorized list of all Java and JVM features since JDK 8 to 16

#96

Post by geodel »

tonyarkles wrote: post #23
laurent92 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Java is a big DSL to transform XML into stacktraces” — so was the joke at the time when domain-specific languages were the hype. This, and the FizzBuzz, Enterprise Edition: https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris... More seriously, what are you missing in Go that is well-done in Java? I assume verbosity of the code is still the defining characteristic of Java?

Now we've got Spring, which in my, admittedly limited, experience does a great job of transforming what could have been compile-time errors into run-time errors.

Yep. Give it a one line error description and it turn into stack trace longer than "War and Peace".

Re: A categorized list of all Java and JVM features since JDK 8 to 16

#97

Post by kaba0 »

laurent92 wrote: post #19
zodiakzz wrote: post #15

Is it in the realm of possibilities that Java will someday have runtime generics support (instead of type erasure)? It's the most frustrating aspect of the language because you can't use basic Java features like method overloading with them. Also, I don't understand how people use the `Optional `..? Is there a way to use method overloading with it? `ErasedType` could be _anything_ at runtime, doesn't sound fun. Besid…

I wish we just had non-nullable types...

With checker framework, you can basically have it (and much much more, I believe no other language comes close to that level of static analysis). It is annotation-based and not a fancy keyword, but it is there.

Re: A categorized list of all Java and JVM features since JDK 8 to 16

#98

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

twh270 wrote: post #78
voidfunc wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> More seriously, what are you missing in Go that is well-done in Java? 1. Generics. And yea, I know Go is getting generics "Real Soon Now" (tm), but it is incredibly annoying to write the same collection code over and over and there's some third-party libs that would really benefit from generics (looking at you Azure Go SDK). 2. Error handling... with the big caveat that I actually like Go's error handling mechanism…

Much of the verbosity came from the false presumption that every field in every class needs a public getter and setter. (I cannot express in words how terrible this is.) Some can come from the framework, mostly poorly-designed ones. I think Java 11 and higher are reasonably terse/expressive without being overly dense.

Remind me, why doesn’t Java have object-properties yet?

So far the only reason I’ve concluded is Java’s language designers’ egos were so damaged by C#, Swift, Kotlin, TypeScript, etc that after dogmatically denying the developer-productivity benefits of properties for the past 20 years that to concede now would mark the end of Java as a language entirely.

...I kid, but seriously I haven’t heard any compelling argument from the Java camp yet for refusing to add this feature. Object-properties are easily the lowest-hanging-fruit with the biggest productivity-gains.

Heck, even some of the most popular C++ compilers support object-properties as proprietary extensions.

Re: A categorized list of all Java and JVM features since JDK 8 to 16

#99

Post by ragnese »

brabel wrote: post #76
dlbucci wrote: post #29

All the backend projects I work on were originally written in Java. I'll admit that Streams and Lombok make it a somewhat pleasant experience to work with, at least compared to when I used it in college (I think Java 8 was newest?). But that said, I once tried writing a new feature in Kotlin, and now all our code is Kotlin. I don't really see how Java can compete with the non-nullable types, data classes, and type-in…

I write a lot of Kotlin code but still tend to use Java a lot. All of the features you mention are not really an advantage for Kotlin anymore. Java has had tools to deal with nulls for a long time, we tend to assume everything is non-null unless annotated with `@Nullable` and let tools check correct usage at compile time... data classes are very similar to Java 16's records. Type-inference since Java introduced `var`…

If I remember correctly, it's fairly easy to use @Nullable and still end up with nulls there, even without an IDE warning. I'll have to double check to see if I can still reproduce that.

But, to be fair, it's actually fairly easy to break Kotlin's null safety, too: https://blog.haroldadmin.com/circular-refs-kotlin/

But I basically agree with what you've said. Kotlin is certainly still a much more ergonomic language, but Java caught up fast recently.

Kotlin 1.5 will be really cool, though, with the new value classes and the mutable methods feature (stolen from Swift).

Re: A categorized list of all Java and JVM features since JDK 8 to 16

#100

Post by Pet_Ant »

offbynull wrote: post #7

They broke backwards compatibility when they moved from 8 to 9. If this is all we got out of it after all this time, IMO it wasn't worth the change.

What backward compatibility did they break except for internal com.sun packages that weren't part of the JDK to begin with but only Sun's implementation?
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