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One year after switching from Java to Go

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Re: One year after switching from Java to Go

#391

Post by okr »

procaryote wrote: post #213
time4tea wrote: post #156

The jvm is a pretty insane beast. It will do usage based recompilation, escape analysis for memory, so non heap allocation is super fast, has great memory safety... But a lot of people use it with spring/spring boot, a technology designed to work around the complexities of a particular type of middleware software in the late 90s and early 2000s. It's cargo cult programming of the highest order. In the OP, the author…

Yep. Java is really good. Java developer culture is awful. If you instead of spring boot just pick a few dependencies you really need, you don't throw the whole Design Patterns book at it just because you can, and you don't try to make everything changeable without recompiling or redeploying, it's pretty nice to work with

Spring boot is just a tool. People seem to forget and take for granted the knowledge that is hidden there. Sure you can wire everything together yourself, but who does that? It would be such a waste of time. I rather wait these 5 seconds for a long running service, tbh.

Re: One year after switching from Java to Go

#392

Post by marginalia_nu »

pylua wrote: post #66
philipwhiuk wrote: post #61

As a Java developer... If the entire problem domain space is written in a language it's dumb not to follow suit. Libraries that solve problems reduce your work to your own specific issues, rather than 'building an apple pie from scratch'. Java is good right now because most problems have libraries to do what you want. Most formats have APIs. It's not perfect in any area - the start-up time is a bit lame, you have to…

I’m also a long time java spring developer. I started writing a game recently and was really surprised about how bad the performance can be when you run it in a tight game loop. The startup time is also a real problem, as you really want to be able to scale up pods quickly. That said, it’s good enough right now. You can make it work at scale, and it’s worth the cost trade off of trying to do it more efficiently in a…

Writing high performance Java is definitely a bit of a dark science, a lot of the performance isn't just the code loop you're looking at, but memory allocations matter quite a lot as well. Complex hierarchies of large long lived objects can absolutely tank your performance.

There can also be a lot of performance to be gained by going off heap. I'd be probably be looking at an ECS design around MemorySegments, rather than modelling the game state with Java objects. Though, to be fair, this is how you'd write a game engine in C++ as well.

Re: One year after switching from Java to Go

#393

Post by rlupi »

arccy wrote: post #307
divan wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Java is really good. Java developer culture is awful. First we shape our tools, then our tools shape us.

the Old Ones shape the tools, the tools shape the rest of us

We should start calling tools from their muses, it would be way more fun.

I mean... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Great_Old_Ones

Truth to be told, there isn't much difference between Gradle and Gwarloth

Re: One year after switching from Java to Go

#394

Post by IshKebab »

pjmlp wrote: post #169

This looks like one of the typical "we switched from A to B, whithout actually mastering A, so B is alright" kind of posts. Just on the monitoring part, Go has nothing even close to VisualVM, Flight Recorder, JRebel, VM agents, JMX. No mention of AOT compilers, JIT caches, and so forth.

I mean, they don't mention monitoring... so so why would they need to master it? How would mastering monitoring tools help them with the problem that Java startup time is orders of magnitude slower than with Go? Especially without having to do any extra configuration work.

Re: One year after switching from Java to Go

#395

Post by amazingamazing »

bdhcuidbebe wrote: post #329
amazingamazing wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please do tell, what typescript, node and a few dependencies cannot do here.

Provide strong typing, low memory footprint and good performance at scale. See the topic of discussion for more details.

Yes, I agree, but what you're saying isn't really relevant in an I/O bound scenario. In any case, I wouldn't write a K8s operator in node.js, yes. Go is the best for that.

Re: One year after switching from Java to Go

#396

Post by akoboldfrying »

tpm wrote: post #242
akoboldfrying wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Test using monkey-patching. TIL Go has monkey-patching. But since it has monkey-patching, how is it statically typed? Or does Go monkey-patching amount to creating an instance of a defined-on-the-fly subclass? The latter would be interesting, because Java lets you do this too -- conveniently "new up" an instance of a subclass that you define inline of a given class or interface (this used to be the easiest way to d…

Java doesn't really enable monkey-patching in the style of Javascript, Perl etc. AFAIK, or am I missing something? That you can create anonymous subclasses during runtime is different to e.g. editing methods of existing objects/classes during runtime.

I agree -- I was just trying to guess what OP might have meant by "monkey-patching" when talking about Go (which is TTBOMK statically typed, which precludes what I'd personally call "monkey-patching" at the language level).

Java does have "agents", which enable arbitrary control of bytecode at class loading time -- bytecode in existing .class files can be transformed, or completely new bytecode generated on-the-fly. But generating bytecode just to replace a class with a test double would be insane.

From another comment I learned there's also a separate "Tool Interface" that can do this bytecode-replacement job, but again, it's a huge amount of tricksiness and bother for something more easily and clearly accomplished in source code with a boring old anonymous subclass. (Though it won't work if the class is sealed, or final, or your code uses reflection to check the class name, or...)

Re: One year after switching from Java to Go

#397

Post by hu3 »

pjmlp wrote: post #371
hu3 wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is 2025. If you can't jump to your own code implementation without having to search for strings, your tech sucks. And most of your message doesn't even apply. How would I Google or read the manual for my own code? We're talking about different things it seems.

With a 1980's technology out of Xerox PARC, it is called IDE.

Exactly. Although from the reply I got above it seems to be alien tech to some.

Re: One year after switching from Java to Go

#398

Post by Ygg2 »

pjmlp wrote: post #169

This looks like one of the typical "we switched from A to B, whithout actually mastering A, so B is alright" kind of posts. Just on the monitoring part, Go has nothing even close to VisualVM, Flight Recorder, JRebel, VM agents, JMX. No mention of AOT compilers, JIT caches, and so forth.

I'm not sure who said it, but the quote went something like this: Programmers are at fault for the current status in Computer Science, rather than working on expanding their knowledge they keep chasing the latest fad.

If someone knows which cankerous Computer Scientist said this, I'd appreciate a reply.

Re: One year after switching from Java to Go

#399

Post by trallnag »

jamesfinlayson wrote: post #8
xxs wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spring by far - Spring is effectively a build tool running at run time (scanning, enhance, code generation, etc.) - most of it is just startup as JVM does a decent job at optimizing the cruft. In most cases the boot times don't matter, though - at least for most people, esp. when it comes to production. (it's mostly developers time wasted) I have some personal experience optimizing Spring to record previous runs and…

> most of it is just startup Yep, I have some Spring code in AWS ECS and it hits 100% CPU usage on start-up before dropping back to 1.5% when idling (this is with 1 vCPU I think). But yeah I remember reading one of the Spring devs say that some (a lot?) of the runtime reflection could be done at compile time but isn't.

This makes recycling nodes, be it ECS or Kubernetes nodes, that run tons of Spring apps, a huge pain.

Re: One year after switching from Java to Go

#400

Post by 725686 »

time4tea wrote: post #156

The jvm is a pretty insane beast. It will do usage based recompilation, escape analysis for memory, so non heap allocation is super fast, has great memory safety... But a lot of people use it with spring/spring boot, a technology designed to work around the complexities of a particular type of middleware software in the late 90s and early 2000s. It's cargo cult programming of the highest order. In the OP, the author…

"cargo cult" really? Have you ever built maintained big a Java codebase? Spring is a marvel that sprang out of the experience of very, very talented people. It can be misused, of course, like any other technology, but it is a huge productivity booster.
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