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Java 26 is here

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Re: Java 26 is here

#201

Post by gf000 »

thefaux wrote: post #139
beachy wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if at we are standing looking at the smoking field of programming languages created over the last 50 years and gazing at the final survivors, of which Java is definitely one. Why would anyone create a new language now? The existing ones are "good enough", and without a body of examples for LLMs to train on, a new language has little chance getting traction. I learned IBM /360 assembler when I started in comp…

> Why would anyone create a new language now? The existing ones are "good enough", and without a body of examples for LLMs to train on, a new language has little chance getting traction. Compiler writing can be an art form and not all art is for mass consumption. > Java has won (alongside many other winners of course), now the AI drawbridge is being raised to stop new entrants and my pick is that Java will still be h…

Intelligence is not a well understood concept. "AI" is also not a well understood concept - we have LLMs that can pick up some novel patterns on "first sight", but then that pattern takes up space in the context window and this kind of learning is quite limited.

Training LLMs on the other hand requires a large amount of training data.

Re: Java 26 is here

#202

Post by HendrikHensen »

pron wrote: post #134
dzonga wrote: post #37

the people that work on Java & the JVM are very smart. it has become a best of breed language - hell its better than Go for industry purposes. the drawback with Java will always be the CULTURE - (maybe someone can insert a quote of how in physics progress is only made, when old physicist die - I don't wanna be morbid ) but with Java same that's when the culture will change. All those people using typescript (could be…

And Java has some advantages that are hard to beat. It performs better than Go and builds just as fast (at least when not using some popular build tools) while offering unmatched deep, low-overhead observability. People might think they may enjoy another language more, but the portion of people who eventually come to regret choosing Java is probably lower than that of any other language.

> It performs better than Go

Do you have some sources or experiences to share on this topic? I'm very curious. My experience is the complete opposite.

At my previous job there was a Java web application and running in Kubernetes (1 vCPU and 1Gi of memory) was able to deal with at most 80 requests per second, using up almost the full 1 vCPU and ~600-700MiB of memory. That was a bit disappointing, since we were supposed to support at most ~1000rps on this API, 13+ pods is a lot, and we felt "software could do better".

A reactive guru from another team told us we should use a reactive stack, so he came in and rebuilt the app using the reactive stack. Now it was doing about 120rps on one pod (about the same memory usage), which was a good improvement, but still disappointing.

One guy on the team was motivated to rewrite the API in Go as a proof of concept, and we were blown away. With the same 1 vCPU it was now able to handle 400 requests per second, while using ~100-200MiB of memory, and having approximately 20% better response times.

> builds just as fast (at least when not using some popular build tools)

I find this a little bit of a cop-out, because almost everyone is using the popular build tools. And it's quite a chore to build a full application without those popular build tools. With Go, all batteries for building are included.

Re: Java 26 is here

#203

Post by gf000 »

nradov wrote: post #112
beachy wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if at we are standing looking at the smoking field of programming languages created over the last 50 years and gazing at the final survivors, of which Java is definitely one. Why would anyone create a new language now? The existing ones are "good enough", and without a body of examples for LLMs to train on, a new language has little chance getting traction. I learned IBM /360 assembler when I started in comp…

Programmers would create a new language when there is a fundamental change in hardware architecture such that the assumptions underlying the old programming languages no longer apply. Java is probably a poor choice for writing software in which most computation happens on GPUs. But I agree that someone (or something) will still be using Java to write new line-of-business applications in 50 years.

Mostly a tongue in cheek reply, but you might be interested in TornadoVM.

(Nonetheless, I agree with you)

Re: Java 26 is here

#204

Post by never_inline »

Nursie wrote: post #176
mands wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's getting better, it doesn't all have to be Spring Boot and JBoss. There is quarkus, helidon and micronaut for slimmer more modern backend frameworks. jbang for scripting (think uvx, bunx), Tambo UI ( https://tamboui.dev/ ) for terminal UIs, and more. Along with all the new Java features that help you write much simpler code - eg. virtual threads, structured concurrency, stream gatherers, and performance / resourc…

Having used micronaut for a few years now, I hate it. Maybe it's innate to trying to use a a fully fledged server-style framework in a serverless context, but I don't think it's suitable. In fact I think the whole idea ("Hey, let's bludgeon spring-like metaphors into an entirely new setting") was a poor one. Java itself I've enjoyed more and more over time as the language has evolved into something much more expressi…

It was a while back (when I was a worse programmer) I found both Micronaut and Quarkus dev experience more palatable than spring.

what did you dislike? Pervasive DI? Annotations? configuration mess?

Re: Java 26 is here

#205

Post by gf000 »

HendrikHensen wrote: post #202
pron wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Java has some advantages that are hard to beat. It performs better than Go and builds just as fast (at least when not using some popular build tools) while offering unmatched deep, low-overhead observability. People might think they may enjoy another language more, but the portion of people who eventually come to regret choosing Java is probably lower than that of any other language.

> It performs better than Go Do you have some sources or experiences to share on this topic? I'm very curious. My experience is the complete opposite. At my previous job there was a Java web application and running in Kubernetes (1 vCPU and 1Gi of memory) was able to deal with at most 80 requests per second, using up almost the full 1 vCPU and ~600-700MiB of memory. That was a bit disappointing, since we were suppose…

Well, what frameworks were used? Also what is behind the web requests, what were they doing? Because it's comparing mostly frameworks, not languages.

As for the build tools, unfortunately the scene is not the best on Java - but javac itself is indeed fast.

Re: Java 26 is here

#206

Post by gf000 »

materielle wrote: post #147
dzonga wrote: post #37

the people that work on Java & the JVM are very smart. it has become a best of breed language - hell its better than Go for industry purposes. the drawback with Java will always be the CULTURE - (maybe someone can insert a quote of how in physics progress is only made, when old physicist die - I don't wanna be morbid ) but with Java same that's when the culture will change. All those people using typescript (could be…

As a Go developer, this is right on the mark. I’ve been hearing good things about Java lately, so I decided to check out the language for the first time since 2012 or something. And I was impressed! The language maintainers have added so many great features while maintaining backwards compatibility. And slowly but surely improved the JVM and garbage collection. So after toying around for a bit, I decided to write som…

> Spring framework when stuff like Django, Rails, or the Go ecosystem exist.

Django and Rails have a very similar model to Spring, so frankly this is just "I was lazy to learn a new tool and it must suck" kinda take. Is there a learning curve? Sure. Does it worth it? I would say for typical CRUD stuff, yeah. No matter how trivial it is you will likely end up needing something that is a single annotation away. But you may want to try quarkus over spring.

Re: Java 26 is here

#207

Post by HendrikHensen »

zadikian wrote: post #92
ludovicianul wrote: post #63

I program in Java for more than 15 years now. I can resonate with people hating the language from it's early days due to the experience with all the enterprisy features and over abstractions. Or confunding Java with the Spring ecosystem. But Java came a long way over the years. It's now what many would call a "modern" language. It's less verbose, has many of the features people find appealing in Scala and Kotlin and…

Lack of virtual threads was its biggest remaining problem because this made the common ways of doing cooperative multitasking very ugly. Go's big thing was having that from the start. Maybe now that Java has it too, it's set? Though JS will still have the least boilerplate because of the way it handles types.

I think there is something to say for compiling to native code, having binaries in the ~25 MiB range, being able to run in distroless containers, being able to run a web application with less than 100MiB of memory and startup times measured in milliseconds rather than seconds (sometimes dozens of seconds).

Don't get me wrong, I like Java and don't very much like the Go language. But Java has a lot to improve upon still.

Re: Java 26 is here

#208

Post by gf000 »

wbl wrote: post #132
kyrra wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the GP, but for really large code bases, Go is missing a few features that I've noticed: 1) No immutable types. My work team is a huge user of immutable data stuctures in Java to make sure data passed around to other teams isn't changed. Go doesn't really have a good way to do this. 2) Refactoring can be really annoying (or at least really noisy) because of public/private being defined by capitalization of method…

I think you want sum types which admittedly Go doesn't have in a matchable way. However complex error recovery is an anti pattern for Go.

> However complex error recovery is an anti pattern for Go.

Bit of snark from my side, but that's exactly what makes it less good of a fit for "industry purposes".

Go's error handling is possibly the worst out of any "modern" language, it basically copied C's errno which is not something you should have ever done.

Re: Java 26 is here

#209

Post by gf000 »

joeblubaugh wrote: post #114
oefrha wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No immutable types (in Go) The typical answer is opaque types with only readonly methods exported. Not elegant, but it’s there. I guess it’s arguably not a “good way” to do it.

In fact it was “the Java way” for many years and “useless getters” was always a big complaint about Java.

I do agree to a certain degree, but with getters/setters you could properly hide/set to read-only fields.

Re: Java 26 is here

#210

Post by pron »

HendrikHensen wrote: post #202
pron wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Java has some advantages that are hard to beat. It performs better than Go and builds just as fast (at least when not using some popular build tools) while offering unmatched deep, low-overhead observability. People might think they may enjoy another language more, but the portion of people who eventually come to regret choosing Java is probably lower than that of any other language.

> It performs better than Go Do you have some sources or experiences to share on this topic? I'm very curious. My experience is the complete opposite. At my previous job there was a Java web application and running in Kubernetes (1 vCPU and 1Gi of memory) was able to deal with at most 80 requests per second, using up almost the full 1 vCPU and ~600-700MiB of memory. That was a bit disappointing, since we were suppose…

From your description it sounds like you're comparing an old Java program running on an old JDK with a new Go program running on a new Go runtime. These days Java has virtual threads (similar to Go's goroutines) and doesn't need a "reactive stack", and its optimising compiler and GCs blow Go out of the water without breaking a sweat.
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