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Java 18 / JDK 18: General Availability

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Re: Java 18 / JDK 18: General Availability

#151

Post by __float »

pritambarhate wrote: post #52
jraph wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still, coming from other languages, it is all too easy to write this and this silently fails without any warning. This is consistent with the rest of the language, but I'd bet one rarely wants referential equality when comparing strings. People commenting "yeah but that's because you are a newbie / you are comparing references and you should know better" miss the point I think. I can easily see myself making this mis…

Linters catch this: https://rules.sonarsource.com/java/RSPEC-4973 Basically the tooling around Java is very evolved and Java static type system helps the IDEs a lot. One of the main reason enterprises prefer Java. Also majority of the tools and IDEs is free for commercial use.

It's easy to make this mistake, still: https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/blob/722d639fad2e4fc6eb2aabd4...

Re: Java 18 / JDK 18: General Availability

#152

Post by jillesvangurp »

stonemetal12 wrote: post #88
kaycebasques wrote: post #5

This is tangential and possibly too open ended to be productive but worth a shot anyway. Why is Java so popular? I know of a major Silicon Valley company that's migrating their backend to it. Why Java over other languages? Or maybe there's not really other viable options? I'm speaking as someone who spent the last 6 years focused on frontend web technology.

What else would you use? Java is the shark that ate everyone else's lunch. At this point all you have as alternatives in the category of "easy to use for backend type stuff" is C#, and go. Both of which have their pros and cons but on the whole aren't bad choices. I guess like bellbottoms, Java is making a fashionable comeback.

Kotlin is actually the natural upgrade from Java if you want something that feels more modern than Java. Very easy to switch to from Java: a conversion tool is actually built into intellij.

For most traditional Java frameworks (like Spring or Quarkus), Kotlin has long been a first class citizen (support, documentation, custom Kotlin extension functions, etc.) and probably the easier language to use when you are starting out with those frameworks. And of course on Android, it has long replaced Java as the default language.

On the server server-side, Spring has done so much work on integrating with Kotlin in the last five years that you are probably not doing yourself any favors if you choose not to use that. Kotlin DSL support is just a killer feature here. Spring has really embraced that and they've added nice Kotlin DSLs for pretty much everything that matters. No more builders. No more endless function chaining. No more annotation magic (or at least a lot less of it).

Re: Java 18 / JDK 18: General Availability

#153

Post by kaba0 »

runevault wrote: post #30
kaycebasques wrote: post #5

This is tangential and possibly too open ended to be productive but worth a shot anyway. Why is Java so popular? I know of a major Silicon Valley company that's migrating their backend to it. Why Java over other languages? Or maybe there's not really other viable options? I'm speaking as someone who spent the last 6 years focused on frontend web technology.

Language with a fast runtime minus startup (although maybe they've fixed the startup since I last looked) that is incredibly tunable to fit your specific needs for good performance profile, while not needing to manage raw memory the way c or c++ would. Personally I prefer c#, but a lot of places already were using Java in significant ways before c# became good (IMO 2.0ish) and saw no reason to change.

Java’s startup only slows down when a ton of classes have to be loaded, e.g. that’s why Clojure’s repl takes quite some time as you are loading two standard libs.

For a simple hello world it is below 0.1s.

Re: Java 18 / JDK 18: General Availability

#154

Post by [deleted] »

kaycebasques wrote: post #5

This is tangential and possibly too open ended to be productive but worth a shot anyway. Why is Java so popular? I know of a major Silicon Valley company that's migrating their backend to it. Why Java over other languages? Or maybe there's not really other viable options? I'm speaking as someone who spent the last 6 years focused on frontend web technology.

[deleted]

Re: Java 18 / JDK 18: General Availability

#155

Post by munificent »

kaycebasques wrote: post #5

This is tangential and possibly too open ended to be productive but worth a shot anyway. Why is Java so popular? I know of a major Silicon Valley company that's migrating their backend to it. Why Java over other languages? Or maybe there's not really other viable options? I'm speaking as someone who spent the last 6 years focused on frontend web technology.

I think it's a combination of four things:

1. GC is an enormous productivity improvement for applications whose performance characteristics can afford it. Seriously, I can't think of a single programming language feature/concept/technology that makes a bigger difference in developer velocity than memory safety and GC.

2. Static types are also a large productivity improvement for developers comfortable using them and the kinds of projects that benefit from them (large, multi-dev, multi-year).

3. Imperative and object-oriented. Java is imperative in the small, which is familiar to most developers and seems to strike a balance of letting developers write correct code with good performance. Java is OOP in the large and for many classes of applications, that's been a wildly successful way of organizing code and lowering the cognitive overhead.

4. Path dependence. The past largely determines the present. We don't reset all of our technology choices and start from scratch at the beginning of each fiscal quarter, so the languages that were widely used tend to stay the languages widely used.

Java was the first heavily engineering and marketed language that featured GC, static types, and OOP, so it got big and continues to stay big.

I also think it's a pretty decent language. The things people don't criticize about Java are mostly complaints about a certain style of programming in the 90s and less the language itself.

Re: Java 18 / JDK 18: General Availability

#156

Post by twic »

zero_shift wrote: post #110
paskozdilar wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO, Marketing. Java had so many marketing crazes that it's crazy. I still remember the "Java mobile game" fad from a dozen of years ago - Java this, Java that, Java for phone, Java for toaster... At some point, the public mind starts to associate "programming" with Java. Since there were (and probably always will be, unless we evolve into utopia) hordes of job-desperate people who would do anything to feed themselv…

I see this post is getting some downvotes; I'm not sure I agree with all of it myself. But I would ask those, who reject the premise here outright, to think back really hard to how things were in the 1990s. The Java brand was everywhere . It was a truly massive endeavour and one of the first languages to really go "viral" as the Solution For Everything. People laugh at the cute "Java runs on four billion devices!" ta…

There absolutely was massive Java hype.

Twenty-five years ago

Hype is not reason why "a major Silicon Valley company that's migrating their backend to it".

Re: Java 18 / JDK 18: General Availability

#157

Post by tyingq »

frant-hartm wrote: post #142
tyingq wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This one looks interesting: "JEP 400: UTF-8 by Default": https://openjdk.java.net/jeps/400 It sounds like a good idea, but I can imagine lots of downstream breakage, some of it not immediately obvious, with apps that make bad assumptions. Edit: The risks section of the linked doc above does explain some of that, and there is some notable risk.

Most of the cases where this breaks anything, are already broken, it's just not visible.

I don't know, they may be broken in terms of approach and design. But when the charset changes, new and never-seen-before things will start arriving downstream.

Re: Java 18 / JDK 18: General Availability

#158

Post by _old_dude_ »

ok123456 wrote: post #147
stevoski wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then why do I have to have multiple JVMs installed, which I need to go through via trial-and-error, if I'm given some random java application? You don't. Almost any Java program written ever will run on Java 18.

JavaFX isn't guaranteed to be in a JVM. You run into "deprecated" APIs that were removed. JVM options change, and that breaks how things are deployed. If the JVM were a stable target a site like http://whichjdk.com/ wouldn't be necessary. This is just how things are. It's Java fanfiction to say this isn't the case, and necessitates having multiple JVMs installed.

Azul (not affiliated) provides JDKs with JavaFX bundled

https://www.azul.com/downloads/?version=java-17-lts&package=...

Re: Java 18 / JDK 18: General Availability

#159

Post by kaba0 »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #152
stonemetal12 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What else would you use? Java is the shark that ate everyone else's lunch. At this point all you have as alternatives in the category of "easy to use for backend type stuff" is C#, and go. Both of which have their pros and cons but on the whole aren't bad choices. I guess like bellbottoms, Java is making a fashionable comeback.

Kotlin is actually the natural upgrade from Java if you want something that feels more modern than Java. Very easy to switch to from Java: a conversion tool is actually built into intellij. For most traditional Java frameworks (like Spring or Quarkus), Kotlin has long been a first class citizen (support, documentation, custom Kotlin extension functions, etc.) and probably the easier language to use when you are start…

But Kotlin will never be first class citizen on the JVM itself. Also, I feel like kotlin is falling in-between all the platforms it try to handle (android, native, js), which might not be a good thing to do.

Re: Java 18 / JDK 18: General Availability

#160

Post by sabageti »

dfee wrote: post #49
junon wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was referring more to structured stack traces. You're able to shoot yourself in the foot in any language's error handling system - quite trivially at that.

But the problem is that checked exceptions create the same “what color is your function” problem for errors.

It isn't? You have a function red that doesn't throws anything you use a function blue that throws checked exceptions you handle the exception and it's all. The red functions doesn't become blue.
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