The decline and fall of Java on the desktop • Hacker News Board

Re: The decline and fall of Java on the desktop

#271

Post by gjvc » Thu, Mar 03, 2022, 8:49 AM UTC

phplovesong wrote: post #249

Java on desktop in 2022 seems like a lost cause. It's always slow and hogs resources like crazy. A good example is all the Jetbrains IDE's. Try running any of them on a low powered laptop and you end up having a bad time. Luckily there seems to be a push for fully native.

changing the garbage collector to G1GC and / or not using JDK11 as the boot java improves matters. JetBrains seems refuse to admit there is a problem. Hopefully things get better when they move to JDK17.

But yes, for the past few years, the experience latency-wise is garbage.

Re: The decline and fall of Java on the desktop

#272

Post by kaba0 » Thu, Mar 03, 2022, 8:52 AM UTC

jeroenhd wrote: post #169

datavirtue wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Winforms is dead, as in not cross platform and WPF...the same. WPF is declarative XML as is Xamarin Forms (both slightly different XML oddly). Not fun.

Microsoft's refusal to port WinForms is truly the most disappointing part of its cross-platform efforts, in my opinion. They have Mono, they can get it working, they just choose not to. I wouldn't build a production application in WinForms, WPF and friends are much better for that. But, for quick&dirty or even moderately complex tools for experts, VS + WinForms simply has no equal. Some Python-based designers come cl…

It wouldn’t make much sense to port Winforms any more, as it is CPU-renderer only. It would be disappointingly slow for anything more complex than, well, forms.

Re: The decline and fall of Java on the desktop

#273

Post by danuker » Thu, Mar 03, 2022, 8:57 AM UTC

jabbany wrote: post #258

phplovesong wrote: post #249

Java on desktop in 2022 seems like a lost cause. It's always slow and hogs resources like crazy. A good example is all the Jetbrains IDE's. Try running any of them on a low powered laptop and you end up having a bad time. Luckily there seems to be a push for fully native.

> Luckily there seems to be a push for fully native. Really? I thought there was a push for Electron/Chromium everywhere (which seems comparable or worse than desktop Java...)

I think Electron is neither here nor there. It is the "stroad" of software distribution: the sluggishness and poor performance of a web interface, coupled with the difficulty to upgrade of a desktop package.

Personally I push for either native apps or web apps, to regain at least one of the benefits lost by packaging web apps.

Re: The decline and fall of Java on the desktop

#274

Post by neuronic » Thu, Mar 03, 2022, 8:58 AM UTC

phplovesong wrote: post #250

geophile wrote: post #53

This article seems quite off. First, it conflates browser and desktop. Yes, applets died an early and deserved death. That is different from what happened with desktop apps. A univeral GUI (e.g. Swing) was wrong-headed. I don't actually know what happened after people moved away from Swing. But even in the time range TFA discusses, Intellij IDEA, an IDE written in Java, was a success. It has always been multi-platfor…

On the contrary. Jetbrains IDE's prove the fact that no matter how much you engineer, a java based desktop application will always be slow and eat huge amounts of resources.

As opposed to the Electron-based editors which modern web developers use and heat Starbucks with?

Re: The decline and fall of Java on the desktop

#275

Post by rusk » Thu, Mar 03, 2022, 9:00 AM UTC

jcelerier wrote: post #263

kaba0 wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that a relevant benchmark? It’s like claiming that c++ is “slow” because look at the memory consumption of this program calculating some big-ass weather model on a cluster of machines.. Intellij does a shit load of thing, caches your files, constantly monitors for changes, etc. It is not vim written in java.

C++ ides do cache files and monitor for changes too but they are much more useable on low-end hardware than anything Java.

Citation and meaningful comparative ananlysis needed here. I would want to be certain you are not making a comparison with powerful text editors like Slickedit or Emacs - these are not the same.

At the scale that something like IntelliJ or your favourite C++ based IDE operate at, Java is not the bottleneck. It’s all down to the system complexity involved in doing all that code crunching in near real time and the integration with various back ends and plugins that causes the lag.

I have used many a native IDE in my time and they’ve all been pretty horrid, and to me Intellij is probably the best of them. At this scale of complexity I think the tightly structured and predictable environment provided by Java actual helps performance as it’s easier to maintain and design a cohesive scalable application.

Re: The decline and fall of Java on the desktop

#276

Post by mikro2nd » Thu, Mar 03, 2022, 9:01 AM UTC

makach wrote: post #47

I used to love Java. Although I think they ruined it with the concept of "Enterprise Java" which only complicating how they were delivering the software. Many good things came out of this work that has been ported to many other frameworks (although, not with the enterprise branding) Java is not slow, I use a couple of high quality desktop applications and these will most likely have a future as long as the language i…

Enterprise Java was almost entirely an IBM creation. IBM had a whole bunch of code that had no real path to money (San Francisco framework with roots back to Taligent). Sun was headed into a firefight with MS; they knew it and knew that they didn't have the resources to go it alone: Sun needed a Gorilla partner.

And so a deal was struck and the world was lumbered with the dumpster-fire that was J2EE, against which Spring Framework was a logical (maybe even sensible at the time) reaction but which ended up becoming it's very own brand of behemothic monster.

Re: The decline and fall of Java on the desktop

#277

Post by danuker » Thu, Mar 03, 2022, 9:05 AM UTC

neuronic wrote: post #274

phplovesong wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary. Jetbrains IDE's prove the fact that no matter how much you engineer, a java based desktop application will always be slow and eat huge amounts of resources.

As opposed to the Electron-based editors which modern web developers use and heat Starbucks with?

"Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law

Re: The decline and fall of Java on the desktop

#278

Post by mikro2nd » Thu, Mar 03, 2022, 9:05 AM UTC

ajuc wrote: post #164

In late 00s I've worked on a pretty big system using C++ and Qt3 for desktop ui. For various reasons we moved to Java SWT. It was so much worse it's not even funny. Part of it was the absurdly overengineered architecture we used. We moved from 2-layer PL/SQL + C++ app to 3-layer PL/SQL + J2EE + SWT but on SWT there were like 5 additional layers and most of the code was XML configuration on the UI side. That's not Jav…

SWT never was a part of Java. It was (as I recall) an IBM/Eclipse invention.

Re: The decline and fall of Java on the desktop

#279

Post by jowdones » Thu, Mar 03, 2022, 9:09 AM UTC

kaba0 wrote: post #253

phplovesong wrote: post #249

Java on desktop in 2022 seems like a lost cause. It's always slow and hogs resources like crazy. A good example is all the Jetbrains IDE's. Try running any of them on a low powered laptop and you end up having a bad time. Luckily there seems to be a push for fully native.

How is that a relevant benchmark? It’s like claiming that c++ is “slow” because look at the memory consumption of this program calculating some big-ass weather model on a cluster of machines.. Intellij does a shit load of thing, caches your files, constantly monitors for changes, etc. It is not vim written in java.

Like everything, IntelliJ got increasingly bloated, at a faster rate than the progress in CPU performance.

I've got a desktop machine from around 2010 with 32-bit OS, Core i5 760 (510 / 1611 point in geekbench single/multithreaded) and 4 Gb RAM, runs my current Java code in IntelliJ from those times at blazing speed. Modify a line of code and run in debug, it's up an running in less than a second.

Same code on a 2018-ish laptop, 64-bit OS, 16 Gb RAM, i7 6700 HQ (798 / 3073 in geekbench) and latest IntelliJ takes up to 10 seconds to start.

It's not "Java", it's bloat.

Re: The decline and fall of Java on the desktop

#280

Post by nvmletsdoit » Thu, Mar 03, 2022, 9:12 AM UTC

"There was always some guy in the back-row of the class with a trench coat and messy beard who let his feelings about the superiority of C++ be known."

Reletable