Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Future of Java 8 Language Feature Support on Android

android-developers.googleblog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 103 posts

Re: Future of Java 8 Language Feature Support on Android

#41

Post by saurik »

exabrial wrote: post #11
pianoben wrote: post #5

This looks to be "language features" only - so, lambdas, but no Java 8 APIs. Optionals, streams, etc are not included. ...I hope they fix IntelliJ's default suggestions, which try to turn all of your loops into `.stream()` calls!

I feel like Google really got bit by "not invented here" syndrome on the original Android vm :/ using normal JVM bytecodes might have been a good idea

AFAIK they did this to 1) improve runtime link/startup times (so, a similar reason why many other mobile devices have their own class file formats; for more information, read my introduction to the subject, linked below), and 2) to make sure they were not violating various bytecode-related patents from Sun that relied upon a stack machine.

http://www.cydiasubstrate.com/id/727f62ed-69d3-4956-86b2-bc0...

Re: Future of Java 8 Language Feature Support on Android

#42

Post by ptx »

dkarl wrote: post #10

The possibility of running Scala >=2.12 (or any other language that is committed to Java 8[1]) on Android seems even more remote now. Jack+Jill at least promised a way of running Java 8 bytecode on Android[2]. What now? Is Java source code going to be the only common currency between the Java 8 and Android ecosystems? [1] https://www.scala-lang.org/download/#Software_Requirements [2] http://stackoverflow.com/question…

My impression from the post was that they were going back to the old (standard) way of letting the standard javac compile Java to bytecode and then letting dx convert it to Dalvik bytecode, but now with the addition of Java 8 bytecode support in dx. Their stated reason is precisely what you bring up: compatibility with tools that work with the bytecode, like the Scala compiler.

Is this impression incorrect? Are they doing something special with the Java source code instead of processing the byte code? Are they doing their own javac compiler?

Re: Future of Java 8 Language Feature Support on Android

#43

Post by izacus »

dkarl wrote: post #10

The possibility of running Scala >=2.12 (or any other language that is committed to Java 8[1]) on Android seems even more remote now. Jack+Jill at least promised a way of running Java 8 bytecode on Android[2]. What now? Is Java source code going to be the only common currency between the Java 8 and Android ecosystems? [1] https://www.scala-lang.org/download/#Software_Requirements [2] http://stackoverflow.com/question…

IMO having Android VM fully compatible with Java 8/9/10 is a non-realistic dream considering what Google is doing now :/

Re: Future of Java 8 Language Feature Support on Android

#44

Post by pjmlp »

izacus wrote: post #31
sjellis wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually clicked on the link with the faint hope that there would be something in the announcement about Kotlin. Google support for Kotlin, or some initiative to get a grip on security updates are the only announcements that I really want to see about Android at this point: I use an Android phone, but there's no end-user things that I feel that it lacks right now. IMO, the significant weaknesses of the platform are…

Why would Google have to announce anything about Kotlin? Do you wait For Apple to announce something about Python before using it on your mac? (We're running Kotlin in production for a long while now and at this point I think starting development of an app in Java is rather silly considering how stable and nice Kotlin is.)

Our customers do, if it isn't a vendor supported language on platform X, usually their IT doesn't allow it on their list of languages for project delivery.

Re: Future of Java 8 Language Feature Support on Android

#45

Post by pjmlp »

izacus wrote: post #35
bjbX wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every feature phone on the planet used to run Java ME without any problem. Dalvik may have had some optimisations, but to claim Java would have run "crazy slow" is unlikely to be the reason Google chose the implement their own VM.

JavaME was a total disaster of incompatibilities, lack of any useful API and broken platform support. The fact that you can use a lot of standard Java libs with Android was and is a huge boon that makes development significantly easier than the hell that was JavaMe.

I guess you never had the fun to port Android code among OEMs, using OEM specific SDKs for specific features like real time audio, or work around firmware bugs specially on Samsung devices.

Android fragmentation is no different than J2ME used to be.

Re: Future of Java 8 Language Feature Support on Android

#46

Post by pjmlp »

izacus wrote: post #37
Cyph0n wrote: post #4

Sounds like good news to me, but I'm not sure why this is not getting more attention. Isn't Java 8 support a huge deal for Android, or am I missing something?

At this point I think any serious shop should be transitioning to Kotlin (just like iOS shops are transitioning to Swift).

Swift is officially an Apple language.

While Kotlin is nowhere to be seen on Android SDK and Google is officially silent on its use.

This matters a lot to customers IT departments, writing the set of delivery languages on their Requests For Proposal to consulting companies.

Re: Future of Java 8 Language Feature Support on Android

#47

Post by johncolanduoni »

pjmlp wrote: post #29
dkarl wrote: post #10

The possibility of running Scala >=2.12 (or any other language that is committed to Java 8[1]) on Android seems even more remote now. Jack+Jill at least promised a way of running Java 8 bytecode on Android[2]. What now? Is Java source code going to be the only common currency between the Java 8 and Android ecosystems? [1] https://www.scala-lang.org/download/#Software_Requirements [2] http://stackoverflow.com/question…

Google has no interest in providing the right support for Java developers it seems. Lack of Java 8 bytecode now, then lack of Java 9 modules tomorrow, and eventually lack of Java 10 value types and improved generics, arrays and JNI replacement. And of course, lack of many of the SE APIs in any case. The fun of writing portable libraries between Java and Android Java is only getting better.

Now that Xamarin is open source, a reasonably stable Java bytecode -> Xamarin-compatible CIL cross-compiler could be pretty useful. It would also solve the problem of varying VM quality between Android versions (especially around the Dalvik to ART transition).

Re: Future of Java 8 Language Feature Support on Android

#48

Post by cel1ne »

bad_user wrote: post #25
makeramen wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kotlin is committed to Android support though, and the community is coming to rally behind it much more than Scala.

Kotlin is just a Java++, akin to what CoffeeScript is to JS, a Java with a different syntax. Scala is not just a Java with a different syntax. Because of how traits work and because of how they were encoded in Java's class format, in older Scala versions even adding a method with a default implementation breaks binary compatibility, which is why the history of Scala has been so fraught with compatibility breakage. Sc…

Kotlin is not CoffeeScript for Java.

Kotlin is Java done much better. Null as syntax, extensions with receivers, reified typing, type-safe builders, first-class lambdas, sealed classes, co-routines and so much more...

Kotlin is my language of choice for just about everything at the moment.

I have done 15+ years of programming in Java (Desktop, Server, Android), JavaScript (ES5, ES6+), Kotlin and a little programming in Coffee-script. Your comparison is just wrong.

It's 100% compatible to Java so of course it's not a completely different language. Haskell is a different language. I like Haskell, but I'm glad that I don't have to convert all my old java code to it.

I can open old java-projects and use Kotlin on a file-by-file basis without any problems.

Re: Future of Java 8 Language Feature Support on Android

#49

Post by pjmlp »

johncolanduoni wrote: post #47
pjmlp wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has no interest in providing the right support for Java developers it seems. Lack of Java 8 bytecode now, then lack of Java 9 modules tomorrow, and eventually lack of Java 10 value types and improved generics, arrays and JNI replacement. And of course, lack of many of the SE APIs in any case. The fun of writing portable libraries between Java and Android Java is only getting better.

Now that Xamarin is open source, a reasonably stable Java bytecode -> Xamarin-compatible CIL cross-compiler could be pretty useful. It would also solve the problem of varying VM quality between Android versions (especially around the Dalvik to ART transition).

I don't feel the pain of lack of modern Java support that much, because I spend most of the time on NDK, but there the tooling support also leaves a lot to be desired, like partial STL support or the whole story regarding build infrastructure.

Xamarin looks a nice proposal out of this mess and as a JVM/.NET/C++ consultant, with focus on native apps, I have been looking into it as possible alternative.

Re: Future of Java 8 Language Feature Support on Android

#50

Post by izacus »

pjmlp wrote: post #46
izacus wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point I think any serious shop should be transitioning to Kotlin (just like iOS shops are transitioning to Swift).

Swift is officially an Apple language. While Kotlin is nowhere to be seen on Android SDK and Google is officially silent on its use. This matters a lot to customers IT departments, writing the set of delivery languages on their Requests For Proposal to consulting companies.

Ruby, Python, JavaScript, Java and others also aren't "official Google", "Apple", "Microsoft" languages and they still run the whole web. It really question the brokenness of a company processes that refuses to use good tooling just because a corpo didn't tell them to.

Kotlin is full interoperable with Java APIs and libraries and at this point there's really very few cases where it's not a significantly better choice for Android development.

Post reply on HN