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Project Jigsaw: Complete

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Re: Project Jigsaw: Complete

#21

Post by badsectoracula »

I remember this from... 11 or so years ago, i think. I was making some Java applet based game and the slow startup time and big JVM download was something that an issue among people making such games (which by the time i was into were dying - although they'd soon get a short lived shot in the arm thanks to Minecraft, but that was later). There were some posts in javagaming.org forums from some people who were talking with Sun (that was before Oracle - Sun at the time was actually interested into uses of Java in gaming and talked with devs, including from smaller/indie developers) about a new improvement for the VM to modularize the packages so that only things that are required would be loaded (faster startup) and the default JVM download would be much smaller (sort of comparable to Flash) which was a big issue at the time for those making web-based games (that niche for Java games would soon die with the introduction of Flash Player 9 and ActionScript 3, although it took a bit for people to actually upgrade).

I remember it was released at some point, but at the end it didn't amount to much since most of the JVM's actual implementation relied on everything else and the "optional" bits were only a small part, so it didn't help almost at all with applets. And by that time Java applet gaming was dead (it never reached Flash gaming's heights, but for a few years in the early/mid 2000s it was still something you could make a living off - if you didn't expect much).

I never heard about it much after that and personally moved away from Java with Flash becoming dominant on the web game scene and soon with Oracle being an dick to everyone. The only reason i used Java was for NetBeans' GUI editor for my tools but with Lazarus [0] becoming very stable by that time and NetBeans looking and behaving weird in my -then- brand new iMac, i abandoned Java for good (the only active Java project i still have is a tilemap editor [1] but this only if you stretch "active" to "hack on it a little every few years").

I also never liked Java much after Java 1.4 - it moved further away from its "simple language" roots and i liked how everything was solved in the library instead of adding extra stuff to the language. Well, that, and things like generics felt very "bolted on" while annotations like `@override` felt unnecessary verbosity (and ugly syntax-wise).

My favorite Java was probably around 1.1 or so (i have a book on that too), some times i think i should make a new language and VM after it but i lose interest quickly - i think i have a bunch of parsers for Java-1.1-like languages lying around in my backups, from every time i get that urge :-P.

[0] http://www.lazarus-ide.org/ [1] http://runtimeterror.com/rep/mapas

Re: Project Jigsaw: Complete

#22

Post by geodel »

clra wrote: post #4

I don't follow Java too closely and the world "module" is so hopelessly generic that I had a hard time understanding what the article was talking about. It links to this document [1] though, which is a long read, but does an excellent job of describing of describing all the ins and outs of the module system. (tl;dr Packages can now declare themselves as modules instead of simple namespaces, and they get to choose exa…

With the raging debate going on in Rust community about module system, it is clear they are still far from having well understood and usable module system for wider Rust community.

Re: Project Jigsaw: Complete

#24

Post by fndrplayer13 »

I think its very exciting they were able to get the number of discrete modules up to 26. That's extremely impressive to me given the age and complexity of Java! I went to a talk a few years back from one of the contributors to this project (forget the name, sorry!) and I think if my memory serves me they had significantly fewer discrete modules at that time -- perhaps 6?

Anyhow, I think this is a great step forward for Java.

Re: Project Jigsaw: Complete

#26

Post by vturner »

badsectoracula wrote: post #21

I remember this from... 11 or so years ago, i think. I was making some Java applet based game and the slow startup time and big JVM download was something that an issue among people making such games (which by the time i was into were dying - although they'd soon get a short lived shot in the arm thanks to Minecraft, but that was later). There were some posts in javagaming.org forums from some people who were talking…

Thanks for the good memories. I remember those days of Java 1.4 start up times and the first talks of modularization coming out. It was so exciting! Then 1.5 came and startup speeds boosted a lot. I recently gave Java another try with a Kotlin project and am fairly impressed. Have not worked with Java in years, mostly in Python recently.

Re: Project Jigsaw: Complete

#27

Post by mschwaig »

puppetmaster30 wrote: post #23

I think this is for people that had issues w/ 'jar hell'. I did not.

The biggest pain for me was that it felt like there was no good way to create a library with some internal structure in the form of packages without exposing parts of your internal implementation as public.

When Jigsaw was delayed I was playing with the idea to create a project called shitty-jigsaw, which would just merge all of the packages in a module and change the access modifiers to be more restrictive according to some module definition.

Re: Project Jigsaw: Complete

#28

Post by chrisseaton »

Koshkin wrote: post #12
djhworld wrote: post #3

I think it's going to take me a while to learn about the module system in Java 9, I'm probably going to bank on watching other projects do it first to see if any best practises emerge as developers get used to the new way of working. One thing I will say though is Java 9 has had a definite improvement on Java applications that run on my Raspberry Pi 3, I think because this got included http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/29…

> 15s Still sounds ridiculous. Assuming this is how much time it takes to initialize the VM, I wonder if it would be possible to have a pool of VM processes that are already running and ready to accept an application code.

> I wonder if it would be possible to have a pool of VM processes that are already running and ready to accept an application code

This was tried with Drip and the earlier Nailgun. The idea doesn't work as well as you'd think for several practical reasons (the JVM is very lazy, so a JVM that does nothing until it has user code to run does just that - nothing).

Re: Project Jigsaw: Complete

#29

Post by 35bge57dtjku »

pebers wrote: post #18
djhworld wrote: post #3

I think it's going to take me a while to learn about the module system in Java 9, I'm probably going to bank on watching other projects do it first to see if any best practises emerge as developers get used to the new way of working. One thing I will say though is Java 9 has had a definite improvement on Java applications that run on my Raspberry Pi 3, I think because this got included http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/29…

The improvement is good, of course, but isn't the whole thing a bit of a straw man? The previous version taking 55 seconds on a Pi 3 seems utterly unacceptable to me, it's actually a pretty capable processor, and even a 15 second startup is pretty slow. Why put up with that when there are modern options (Go and Rust spring to mind) which would do so much better?

I don't think that's what 'straw man' means.

Re: Project Jigsaw: Complete

#30

Post by kevinherron »

Koshkin wrote: post #12
djhworld wrote: post #3

I think it's going to take me a while to learn about the module system in Java 9, I'm probably going to bank on watching other projects do it first to see if any best practises emerge as developers get used to the new way of working. One thing I will say though is Java 9 has had a definite improvement on Java applications that run on my Raspberry Pi 3, I think because this got included http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/29…

> 15s Still sounds ridiculous. Assuming this is how much time it takes to initialize the VM, I wonder if it would be possible to have a pool of VM processes that are already running and ready to accept an application code.

Bad assumption.
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