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The future of java

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Re: The future of java

#11
post #10
post #5

What Charles says without actually saying, and what I find most interesting, is that the new age of platform war will be waged on VMs. In that case, I don't think Charlie has anything to worry about. The JVM may not be all peaches and cream, but it's at least as good or better than the CLR, and Parrot hasn't reached critical mass yet. LLVM is interesting, but aims a bit below all of these. What I'd really like to see…

How is it better than the CLR? !troll, I'm genuinely curious.

I don't have any data with which to back this up, but as far as I can tell it's a little faster and it has better multithreading guarantees and performance. Oh, and it's open source (mostly. sigh.) and has some pretty cutting-edge languages, e.g. Clojure and Scala.

Mono is one to watch, though.

Re: The future of java

#12
post #8

The supposed weakness of Scala as being "too complicated" or "too rich" can be countered by developing coding standards, creating more robust editors and tools, and by better educating polyglots on how best to use Scala. This will never work. It never worked with C++. You need sharp C++ programmers to produce C++ code; you can't use mediocre programmers using a subset of the language. Even if you enforce simplicity i…

The superficial similarity is deceptive.

C++, the elegance of a subset is replaced with a grab-bag of features when you zoom out.

Scala, the grab bag of features are replaced with an elegant unified language when you zoom out.

Scala gives average programmers an upgrade path and rewards them for following it. C++ gives average programmers a headache. In Java the average programmer thinks he knows the language, but that won't do him any good if all the important patterns are above the language at library level or higher.

Re: The future of java

#13
post #5

What Charles says without actually saying, and what I find most interesting, is that the new age of platform war will be waged on VMs. In that case, I don't think Charlie has anything to worry about. The JVM may not be all peaches and cream, but it's at least as good or better than the CLR, and Parrot hasn't reached critical mass yet. LLVM is interesting, but aims a bit below all of these. What I'd really like to see…

In some ways it has happened a little with smalltalk: Gemstones MagLev for ruby work demonstrates that it is possible.

Whilst for many things I like the VM "platform" idea, I still think of lower level compile-to-the-metal languages are more real to me, and always necessary for some things, but perhaps thats my age and experience, and in time VMs will be the norm and native compilation will be like asm code... who knows..

Re: The future of java

#14
post #5

What Charles says without actually saying, and what I find most interesting, is that the new age of platform war will be waged on VMs. In that case, I don't think Charlie has anything to worry about. The JVM may not be all peaches and cream, but it's at least as good or better than the CLR, and Parrot hasn't reached critical mass yet. LLVM is interesting, but aims a bit below all of these. What I'd really like to see…

In some ways it has happened a little with smalltalk: Gemstones MagLev for ruby work demonstrates that it is possible. Whilst for many things I like the VM "platform" idea, I still think of lower level compile-to-the-metal languages are more real to me, and always necessary for some things, but perhaps thats my age and experience, and in time VMs will be the norm and native compilation will be like asm code... who kn…

If you need this for jvm based languages you can always use excelsior jet. It's awesome.

Re: The future of java

#15
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some ways it has happened a little with smalltalk: Gemstones MagLev for ruby work demonstrates that it is possible. Whilst for many things I like the VM "platform" idea, I still think of lower level compile-to-the-metal languages are more real to me, and always necessary for some things, but perhaps thats my age and experience, and in time VMs will be the norm and native compilation will be like asm code... who kn…

If you need this for jvm based languages you can always use excelsior jet. It's awesome.

years ago I used it (back 2002-ish?) and it worked pretty well back then. Have also used GCJ for some things - but it always seems like its just creating a little JVM hidden in the native code - still not quite the same "feeling" as macro assembler (which is how I saw C back when I did it) - still many layers above.

I know, its probably all in my head, but still, in my head the real stuff happens on the metal, not in abstractions (I am an elec engineer at heart, trained as one and will always be one).

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