Negotiations Failed: How Oracle Killed Java EE • Hacker News Board

Re: Negotiations Failed: How Oracle Killed Java EE

#61

Post by pjmlp » Sat, May 04, 2019, 10:25 AM UTC

acqq wrote: post #35

_lbaq wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working in the JVM world I'm always surprised to hear that its dying, the JVM and Java moves faster forward than ever, Graal is about to go 1.0, a bunch of very interesting (very) low latency GCs are in the pipe (for example ZGC and Shenandoah) and lots of other interesting projects like Valhalla promise to keep the JVM relevant for the next 20 years. Oracle have made some moves to monetize on parts of its investment…

> Working in the JVM world I'm always surprised to hear that its dying So how is this "JVM world" escaping the grip of Oracle? E.g. graalvm is directly Oracle's, or am I missing something? Specifically, what is preventing any of the Java-related things people use now (including those that you mention) to end like the OP is describing? Asking as somebody outside of that world, but interested "how much it's worth consi…

Yes, Graal is the evolution of Maxime, started by Sun Research Labs, which Oracle kept alive.

All good alternatives to the JVM are commercial.

The free ones are generally just repackaging Oracle's work on the OpenJDK, with zero contribution to Java's research and respective improvements.

Hence why it is always ironic to see the crys to use OpenJDK and forget about Oracle.

Re: Negotiations Failed: How Oracle Killed Java EE

#62

Post by acqq » Sat, May 04, 2019, 10:27 AM UTC

_lbaq wrote: post #54

acqq wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Working in the JVM world I'm always surprised to hear that its dying So how is this "JVM world" escaping the grip of Oracle? E.g. graalvm is directly Oracle's, or am I missing something? Specifically, what is preventing any of the Java-related things people use now (including those that you mention) to end like the OP is describing? Asking as somebody outside of that world, but interested "how much it's worth consi…

Graal Community Edition is licensed under GPL, there is a Enterprise Edition that has additional features that is licensed differently. OpenJDK does not need commercial licensing, but Oracle JDK which is built from OpenJDK needs. Then there are plenty of other vendors to chose from if you absolutely does not want to interact with Oracle. IBM and now Eclipse foundation OpenJ9 is a very interesting TCK compliant JVM, t…

GPL is not usable for any small company which doesn't want to publish its own sources.

What can be used only using BSD, MIT, Apache licenses? And what from the GPL-licensed products is safe to use to produce and sell own closed source products (e.g. where the exception to GPL exists for just linking the libraries or similar)?

Edit1: Long term dangers/costs of depending on the technologies that need commercial licenses like Oracle’s are also important.

Edit2: And additionally, just as an old example, once I’ve considered using Berkeley DB in the closed source product (before some of the current alternatives were available), and my interaction with Oracle proved that only a bigger corporation could fund that. For a library which was already open source, but owned by Oracle. It's not that I'm in the "I don't want to pay for anything" camp -- I'm simply having a perspective of a small player. And about small players Oracle couldn't care less. However, the significant changes very often come at that level of cheapness and overhead, most of technologies would be still not widely accepted otherwise.

Re: Negotiations Failed: How Oracle Killed Java EE

#63

Post by threeseed » Sat, May 04, 2019, 10:27 AM UTC

dtech wrote: post #52

_lbaq wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working in the JVM world I'm always surprised to hear that its dying, the JVM and Java moves faster forward than ever, Graal is about to go 1.0, a bunch of very interesting (very) low latency GCs are in the pipe (for example ZGC and Shenandoah) and lots of other interesting projects like Valhalla promise to keep the JVM relevant for the next 20 years. Oracle have made some moves to monetize on parts of its investment…

Too little too late, and I highly doubt that (5-year-old) Valhalla will deliver even one of the promised features (value types) in the next 3 years. Remember that the original plan was to have all Valhalla features in Java 10. Java/JVM was in the ideal position to dominate the software world for the whole 21th century 15 years ago. Instead they did an IE6 and stagnated for so long that their competitors became plain…

Kotlin runs on JVM and needs Java to even bootstrap.

And the idea that corporate developers or even frankly any developers are switching to LLVM and WebAssembly en masse is pretty ridiculous.

Java as a language may be getting less developer interest but Scala, Clojure and Kotlin are as strong as ever.

Re: Negotiations Failed: How Oracle Killed Java EE

#64

Post by pjmlp » Sat, May 04, 2019, 10:28 AM UTC

realusername wrote: post #56

pjmlp wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that Kotlin still lags behind Java compiler speed and it is heavily dependent on Java libraries.

All of these are technical issues which will be solved by Google eventually, I'm not worrying much about that, they definitely have the resources to make it work.

I bet that in 5 years Kotlin will have as much market as other alternative JVMs languages have today.

And regarding Google, Kotlin is not among the beloved ChromeOS and Fuchsia languages.

So it depends very much on their internal politics.

Re: Negotiations Failed: How Oracle Killed Java EE

#65

Post by fmhul » Sat, May 04, 2019, 10:30 AM UTC

rbanffy wrote: post #14

pjmlp wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck with the performance over there.

The hot parts we can implement in C. There's not much overhead in crossing over to native code.

You'll always need more performance so you'll end up rewriting big parts of the codebase in C because you can't afford the servers and/or can't scale anymore. You'll be kicking the can down the road again and again. Also C is hard. At that point you will realise using Python was a stupid idea when you had other options like Go. It has happened to many people.

Re: Negotiations Failed: How Oracle Killed Java EE

#66

Post by pjmlp » Sat, May 04, 2019, 10:31 AM UTC

mhuffman wrote: post #43

pjmlp wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A language that requires C for anything regarding performance is only useful for scripting and learning to program.

I mean, what do you think the Java VM is written in?

AOT compiled Java, JITed Java, C++, depending on which JVM we are talking about.

Re: Negotiations Failed: How Oracle Killed Java EE

#67

Post by threeseed » Sat, May 04, 2019, 10:31 AM UTC

realusername wrote: post #48

vfc1 wrote: post #23

The Java ecosystem has been slowly dying for years, it's already the new Cobol at this stage. I have the impression that a lot of the mindshare has switched to the Node and Javascript ecosystem, especially the frontend devs, via the Typescript / Angular path, which is a natural path to Java developers due to the comfort given by familiar concepts like static types, classes, etc. When I used to do Java, I always found…

I would not go as far to say it's dying but it's heavily slowing down for sure. First because of the big move out of the "entreprise" software and secondly because of Oracle legal team. It's definitely due to the licensing that Android is switching to Kotlin for example.

a) Java/JVM hasn't moved out of the enterprise space at all. Not sure where you got that idea.

b) Android isn't switching to Kotlin because of licensing since it is a JVM language after all. It's purely because it is a much better language than Java and has great tooling courtesy of Jetbrains.

Re: Negotiations Failed: How Oracle Killed Java EE

#68

Post by marak830 » Sat, May 04, 2019, 10:33 AM UTC

dtech wrote: post #38

marak830 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hand up uh not as experienced as most people on HN, what's the hate for c#? I went from vb6 to VB.net then c# and while I fully admit I'm a casual coder, i haven't had an issue (with what I do, which is voice to string primarily) so far. Is there something better for this I perhaps should look into?

The .NET ecosystem is an order of magnitude smaller than the JVM ecosystem. Up until ~3 years¹ ago C#/.NET also meant a fully Microsoft and Windows environment for all practical purposes². This is changing and Microsoft seems to be embracing open source and Linux, but it takes time for a 20 year old ecosystem to fully make the transition. ¹ The story is Steve Balmer was very anti-open source and forbade most interop…

Hmm thanks for the info, I'll admit I haven't used pretty much any ecosystem outside of windows (aside from my new jobs Mac which drives me nuts(non coding job)), but haven't had a need to install any variant of Linux.

Which still leaves me a tad confused, is the anger because c# is a propriety windows tech(I'm guessing from the responses - which btw thank you to the threads I don't respond to).

Re: Negotiations Failed: How Oracle Killed Java EE

#69

Post by dtech » Sat, May 04, 2019, 10:33 AM UTC

_lbaq wrote: post #60

dtech wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too little too late, and I highly doubt that (5-year-old) Valhalla will deliver even one of the promised features (value types) in the next 3 years. Remember that the original plan was to have all Valhalla features in Java 10. Java/JVM was in the ideal position to dominate the software world for the whole 21th century 15 years ago. Instead they did an IE6 and stagnated for so long that their competitors became plain…

Kotlin is a JVM language, sold as a better Java, and the JVM is really the thing that is the echo system gathers around, not necessarily the language Java. Other interesting languages you have on the JVM is Scala (multi-paradigm), Clojure (Lisp), EtaLang (Haskell) - https://eta-lang.org - https://www.scala-lang.org - https://kotlinlang.org - https://clojure.org

Notice how I separately addressed JVM and Java.

Java is already losing market share to JVM competitor languages.

JVM is in a stronger position than Java, but imagine a world were 15-10 years ago native compilation for JVM bytecode became available instead of 1 year ago. LLVM wouldn't have stood a chance.

Kotlin and Scala (I'm not too familiar with Clojure and others) are hedging their bets and making JS/Webassembly and LLVM versions.

Re: Negotiations Failed: How Oracle Killed Java EE

#70

Post by evgen » Sat, May 04, 2019, 10:33 AM UTC

shadowmint wrote: post #27

rbanffy wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hot parts we can implement in C. There's not much overhead in crossing over to native code.

Lovely theory, but in practice it works more like this: 1) write everything in python because its easy and quick to do so. 2) its slow as. 3) abandon software and write it in something else, or, live on with slow ass software and blame python for being slow and rubbish forever more. re-writing python in c is a hideously painful process, and its proven to be very unsuccessful practically. Writing new code in c/c++/wha…

No, in practice is works something like this:

1) write everything in python

2) yeah, the performance here is good enough so ship it

3) there is no 3

There are very few situations where performance is going to be an issue for you where there is not an existing C module solution that will solve the problem for you. The tired old 'python is slow' trope is getting more and more irrelevant every day. There are other aspects of the language that may make it a mediocre solution to the problem at hand, but out in the real world most people are simply getting the job done with python.