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2026: The Year of Java in the Terminal?

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Re: 2026: The Year of Java in the Terminal?

#131

Post by slowmovintarget »

martylamb wrote: post #79

I spent a long time caring about JVM startup time and CLI suitability (and wrote nailgun [0] over 20 years ago and jsap [1] shortly after specifically because of it), so it's pretty wild to see how far things have come. Modern JVM startup speed and GraalVM native-image have eliminated most of the old excuses. jlink+jpackage help a lot with distribution, and JBang takes it to another level. I've used JBang before but…

Strokes chin inquisitively in Babashka... hmmm...

Edit: Heh... https://rattlin.blog/bbgum.html

Re: 2026: The Year of Java in the Terminal?

#132

Post by javcasas »

bsan3 wrote: post #10

Agree, Java also had straight single file execution forever now. Java foo.java. I use it instead of scripts all the time. Solid language with a lot of flexibility, Oracle has done a good job in last few years. Newer Java frameworks are fairly easy and light to use. We have natively image Lambda functions in production. Work well.

Imagine having to know the programming language used to write a program to run it.

$ python foobar

Nope.

$ gcc foobar

Nope.

$ g++ foobar

Aw,come on.

$ go foobar

Damnit.

$ rust foobar

$ c# foobar

WTF did they use for this program??!!

$ node foobar

This is such a waste of time.

$ java foobar

Bullshit!

$ ocaml foobar

Come on, there arent't that many more programming languages!

$ tcl foobar

Finally!

Re: 2026: The Year of Java in the Terminal?

#133

Post by tpoacher »

vips7L wrote: post #18

Java will never become a player in CLI tooling until build packaging becomes first class. Go, Rust, and other languages are so common because their build tooling is dead simple. You can easily get a single file distributable in a single command. go build, cargo build, dotnet publish —-self-contained. Java on the other hand makes it impossible to get a single distributable. There is no way to get your jar + the vm int…

isn't this exactly what modules and jlink do?

Re: 2026: The Year of Java in the Terminal?

#135

Post by speed_spread »

vips7L wrote: post #21
larusso wrote: post #11

Maybe some of the old beliefs regarding startup time etc are no longer valid. Maybe the programming model isn’t as verbose as it used to be. But I don’t want to distribute a 200MB+ binary. I have colleagues who tell me that c# scripting is so awesome. One only needs .NET installed or use AOT or whatever. Sorry but Go and Rust and good forgive a python script is smaller and mostly easier to read and write then most st…

Using modules and jlink your Java image would be much smaller than 200mb. Full desktop apps with ui’s can get down to 30mb. I’m confused by your disregard of C# AOT. It produces binaries as small as go or rust. 1.1 MB for hello world on linux.

The problem is that packaged Java CLI utilities will also take 20MB+. The minimum size is still much too big for that class of programs. Also, AoT compilation was an absolute pain last I tried it, it's a big change for an ecosystem that was always designed as modular and dynamic. I love Java, but for CLI apps I'll take Rust whenever possible.

Re: 2026: The Year of Java in the Terminal?

#136

Post by tylerchilds »

Going to be honest

Absolutely shocked Java wasn’t in the terminal

I know I don’t use it, but wow.

Honestly, super impressed that that they’ve got the traction they do without it but, I think the takeaway is that Java developers like having everything in the IDE— so I’d imagine agentic in the ide will yield higher returns than switching modalities

Re: 2026: The Year of Java in the Terminal?

#137

Post by waffletower »

laughingcurve wrote: post #14

The article makes no compelling points to me as an avid user of these applications. I would rather shove ice picks covered in lemon juice than provide Java or Ellison anymore room in the digital ecosystem. And I’m not talking politics here wrt Ellison, just awful

I'm a progressive -- just as I am not dumping my climate friendlier Tesla at a loss because Musk is a Nazi buffoon, there is no way I am walking away from my GraalVM compiled babashka binary because another billionaire turd kicked Stephen Colbert off the tonight show. I can mourn and label both as petulant and stupid, without having to bleed my back like Saint Thomas More.

Re: 2026: The Year of Java in the Terminal?

#138

Post by weinzierl »

It is not only the language but also the mindset and culture. When in Java System.exit() and even System.println() are treated as smells and I have to actively push to get exceptions from the company wide style I'll just write Rust and be done.

Re: 2026: The Year of Java in the Terminal?

#139

Post by winrid »

fweimer wrote: post #89
voidfunc wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

jpackage It does all of this work for you and its a standard tool that dumps out a platform specific application bundle. The only people living in 2010 are the ones that choose to live there with incredibly outdated takes on things they dont understand.

Bundling the JRE in the bundle typically results in something that is not redistributable with the default OpenJDK license: The Java ecosystem is heavily tilted towards the Apache license, but Hotspot is licensed under the GPL v2 only (no classpath exception). The Apache license and older GPL versions (before 3) are generally assumed to be incompatible.

Every modern openjdk build is licensed as GPLv2 + classpath exception. That exception includes hotspot, since it's part of the jvm. That exemption allows shipping the JVM with your app or linking to it. Otherwise a bunch of enterprise software couldn't exist.
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