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Project Valhalla, Explained: How a Decade of Work Arrives in JDK 28

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Re: Project Valhalla, Explained: How a Decade of Work Arrives in JDK 28

#111

Post by pjmlp »

pfannl wrote: post #107
andyjohnson0 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The whole attitude and process around this and the other topics gives me very little faith that Java can be steered in a sensible direction here. I agree. The stewardship of Java seems rather lacking - particularly when compared to that of .net, where MS etc. mostly seemed to make the correct decisions from the start. Does Java even have any value or mindshare at Oracle nowadays? The company seems to be a datacentr…

C# often feels like Java with hindsight; Java feels like Java with 30 years of backward compatibility debt.

Hence why so many .NET projects keep being .NET Framework instead having migrated to modern .NET.

Re: Project Valhalla, Explained: How a Decade of Work Arrives in JDK 28

#112

Post by pjmlp »

toyg wrote: post #80
Someone wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How .net got so many things right where java did not is a mystery to me Part of the reason for that is that Java is older. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_Sharp_(programming_language)... : “In interviews and technical papers, he has stated that flaws in most major programming languages (e.g. C++, Java, Delphi, and Smalltalk) drove the fundamentals of the Common Language Runtime (CLR), which, in turn, drove the desi…

This. C# was basically always meant to be "Java but done right". It came several years later, after Microsoft was legally barred from "EEE"-ing Java and required a direct competitor.

Ironically, they still do need Java for Azure, https://devblogs.microsoft.com/java

Re: Project Valhalla, Explained: How a Decade of Work Arrives in JDK 28

#113

Post by pjmlp »

cm2187 wrote: post #88
toyg wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. C# was basically always meant to be "Java but done right". It came several years later, after Microsoft was legally barred from "EEE"-ing Java and required a direct competitor.

But what I don’t get reading the original article is that they present how to insert struct in an object oriented language as an intractable problem, whereas a good implementation with .net (as far as I can tell) has been out there for nearly 30 years. And C# was shameless about stealing from other languages.

The problem is how to do it without breaking ABI, 30 years of Maven Central is very relevant, Java isn't doing a Python over value types.

Re: Project Valhalla, Explained: How a Decade of Work Arrives in JDK 28

#114

Post by GHanku »

recursive-call wrote: post #105
fsuts wrote: post #101

Java = Oracle = Ellisons way of doing business Unless your company forces you to use Java for new projects, consider a change

name another statically typed, compiled, mature language with a bunch of packages for everything and maybe I will /srs

[dead]

Re: Project Valhalla, Explained: How a Decade of Work Arrives in JDK 28

#115

Post by pjmlp »

jbellis wrote: post #51
rf15 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How .net got so many things right where java did not is a mystery to me, but appreciated (it has its own flaws, of course). Java, in my understanding, is still of core relevance to Oracle, and tied into a lot of contracts that require very little effort from them to maintain. But you are correct in observing that they want to be a datacentre/compute business more and more these days; they may have in fact overcomitte…

It's no mystery. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg

Which recently decided that Go was a better option than C# for the Typescript rewrite, exactly because not all decisions were done correctly to make C# a better fit for the problem.

Re: Project Valhalla, Explained: How a Decade of Work Arrives in JDK 28

#116

Post by Someone »

cm2187 wrote: post #88
toyg wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. C# was basically always meant to be "Java but done right". It came several years later, after Microsoft was legally barred from "EEE"-ing Java and required a direct competitor.

But what I don’t get reading the original article is that they present how to insert struct in an object oriented language as an intractable problem, whereas a good implementation with .net (as far as I can tell) has been out there for nearly 30 years. And C# was shameless about stealing from other languages.

> how to insert struct in an object oriented language as an intractable problem, whereas a good implementation with .net (as far as I can tell) has been out there for nearly 30 years. And C# was shameless about stealing from other languages.

I think (but may be wrong) their concerns are about the insert part. C# always had structs, Java wants to add them in a backward-compatible way. They want, for example, existing generic container classes pulled in from a .jar (i.e. already compiled) to support Java value types.

Re: Project Valhalla, Explained: How a Decade of Work Arrives in JDK 28

#118

Post by cm2187 »

pjmlp wrote: post #113
cm2187 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what I don’t get reading the original article is that they present how to insert struct in an object oriented language as an intractable problem, whereas a good implementation with .net (as far as I can tell) has been out there for nearly 30 years. And C# was shameless about stealing from other languages.

The problem is how to do it without breaking ABI, 30 years of Maven Central is very relevant, Java isn't doing a Python over value types.

But if you define a new type, how is that breaking backward compatibility?

Re: Project Valhalla, Explained: How a Decade of Work Arrives in JDK 28

#119

Post by PaulHoule »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #12
rf15 wrote: post #4

I appreciate the hard work that went into the things that did make it into Valhalla eventually, but: > The model was powerful, but also mentally heavy No it isn't! it is this interpretation that kills off the null-safety debate entirely. Saying you have a variable that cannot be null is not a mentally taxing distinction, especially since everything is labelled thoroughly. > The team, faithful to the lesson “simplify…

> The whole attitude and process around this and the other topics gives me very little faith that Java can be steered in a sensible direction here. I agree. The stewardship of Java seems rather lacking - particularly when compared to that of .net, where MS etc. mostly seemed to make the correct decisions from the start. Does Java even have any value or mindshare at Oracle nowadays? The company seems to be a datacentr…

.NET made different decisions.

I was at a conference on scientific programming in Java very early on that Geoff Fox put on up at Syracuse and we had a list of requests from Sun that they didn't give us but Microsoft gave many of them right away.

On the other hand I really like Java's all-virtual approach to inheritance because the .NET model gives programmers more ways to screw up and get confused.

Both languages slipped in generics after 1.0. Java used type erasure in a way that made it so a List is really a List so generics could be retrofitted easily to existing code. .NET's implementation of generics let you do more but caused a rift in the ecosystem between generic and non-generic collections.

I'd say long term Oracle's stewardship of Java has been very good. JDK 8 puts lambdas on your fingertips with a very fluent syntax that belies the idea that Java is terribly verbose. Since then Java has gotten steadily better release after release while maintaining great compatibility.

I work with people who are conservative about updates because they are worried about breaking things but for the last few LTS releases I've said "it ought to be really easy, let's give it a try" and it is really easy and we get performance improvements we can feel.

Re: Project Valhalla, Explained: How a Decade of Work Arrives in JDK 28

#120

Post by drzaiusx11 »

Am I understanding this correctly: a value type really only works when it fits on a 64 bit "cache line", and when larger, it falls back to normal heap allocated objects as before? Seems extremely limiting, no? Great for a boxing optimization, but not much else unless you're deal with very small data types regularly...
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