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Don’t call it a comeback: Java is still champ

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Re: Don’t call it a comeback: Java is still champ

#71

Post by hackerlight »

thrown_22 wrote: post #31
abadger9 wrote: post #22

I've used Java my entire career and i'm fortunate for it. I appreciate how readable the code is (unlike my experience with Erlang, Haskell, etc), typically i don't have foundational issues in the web framework (once again had some with Haskell). Everything works, if I need to do low latency, there's great libraries and resources, if i need to build a simple internal tool, it can be done effortlessly. I think python i…

>if I need to do low latency If the JVM is considered low latency I shudder to think what is high latency.

Java is pretty fast. Second most popular language in HFT. Can get it to a few tens of micros. Not as fast as C++ at sub 5 micros. So good enough for many latency sensitive apps.

Re: Don’t call it a comeback: Java is still champ

#72

Post by gclaramunt »

halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #18
falcolas wrote: post #5

Java's adequate. It's like a Toyota Corolla (insert your boring car of choice here if you don't feel this one works for the analogy). Not the prettiest, not the fastest, not the most efficient. But it gets you from point A to point B with little fuss or muss. I totally get why companies adopt and standardize on it. Do I use it for personal projects? Nope. Because it's not fun to "drive". For that, I pick the equivale…

What does that make Scala? A RAV4?

Lexus

Re: Don’t call it a comeback: Java is still champ

#73

Post by xxpor »

nelsondev wrote: post #56
bullen wrote: post #27

The only problem Java has is experienced C programmers don't build servers from scratch with it yet. Once they take that responsibility, the debate will be over because: "While I'm on the topic of concurrency I should mention my far too brief chat with Doug Lea. He commented that multi-threaded Java these days far outperforms C, due to the memory management and a garbage collector. If I recall correctly he said "only…

The p50 speed up from delaying memory management comes with a trade off, namely you get Garbage Collection pauses, bad p99, and spend your effort tuning the Garbage Collector instead of your code.

An uncommon but not unheard method around that (in services that have diurnal patterns) is to throw memory at it and collect once a day during the down time. You can take the server out of service, restart it, and put it back in service.

Re: Don’t call it a comeback: Java is still champ

#74

Post by wvenable »

falcolas wrote: post #34
throwawaymaths wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corollas don't come with all sorts of weird (now aging) buzzword-driven preferences like nudging you towards xml, factories, etc.

Personal rant: I've never understood the hate towards XML. It's a practical and flexible markup language that does not depend on whitespace or quoting every bloody thing. Plus, every markup language invented since has had to re-invent XML things that, surprise surprise were actually needed. Paths, schemas, comments, etc. I get frustrated with JSON because of things I could do in XML that I can't do in JSON without br…

In Java-land, XML became a replacement for actual code. And for that, it's kind of terrible.

But programs that store their data as XML rather than some proprietary binary or text format are awesome.

Re: Don’t call it a comeback: Java is still champ

#75

Post by kaba0 »

nelsondev wrote: post #56
bullen wrote: post #27

The only problem Java has is experienced C programmers don't build servers from scratch with it yet. Once they take that responsibility, the debate will be over because: "While I'm on the topic of concurrency I should mention my far too brief chat with Doug Lea. He commented that multi-threaded Java these days far outperforms C, due to the memory management and a garbage collector. If I recall correctly he said "only…

The p50 speed up from delaying memory management comes with a trade off, namely you get Garbage Collection pauses, bad p99, and spend your effort tuning the Garbage Collector instead of your code.

Does it really? With Java’s G1GC the only knob you may end up having to tune is the max target pause time - which pretty much chooses between better p50 and worse p99 va worse p50 and better p90 - aka throughput vs latency, that are almost inherently opposite ends of the same spectrum. It is not GC-specific that any improvement will fail to increase one of those.

So the actual tradeoff is more whether you want better throughput or tail-latency. To improve the latter, you have a singular command line option of using ZGC as well.

Re: Don’t call it a comeback: Java is still champ

#76

Post by commandlinefan »

nailer wrote: post #55
naikrovek wrote: post #36

and it still enforces terribly strict OOP patterns onto the developer which is almost never the right way to develop software if you care about performance even a little.

Even if you don't care about performance and only care about simplicity OOP is really hard to rationalise about.

Java has supported (mostly) functional programming constructs since 1.8 (which was 2014), so you can realistically use it without doing too much OO.

I've observed, though, that people who complain about OO in Java usually write top-down procedural code rather than functional-style code, which is far, far worse.

Re: Don’t call it a comeback: Java is still champ

#77

Post by silvestrov »

falcolas wrote: post #34
throwawaymaths wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corollas don't come with all sorts of weird (now aging) buzzword-driven preferences like nudging you towards xml, factories, etc.

Personal rant: I've never understood the hate towards XML. It's a practical and flexible markup language that does not depend on whitespace or quoting every bloody thing. Plus, every markup language invented since has had to re-invent XML things that, surprise surprise were actually needed. Paths, schemas, comments, etc. I get frustrated with JSON because of things I could do in XML that I can't do in JSON without br…

xml also scales much better with deeply nested documents (such as html documents).

A deeply nested JSON document is difficult to navigate in. Even with prettyprint it is counting indentation to find out what kind of info this level has.

Take the html page for news.ycombinator.com and convert the html document into JSON format. It becomes unreadable.

Re: Don’t call it a comeback: Java is still champ

#78

Post by jayd16 »

topspin wrote: post #62
e67f70028a46fba wrote: post #26

The biggest thing Java is missing is full hot swap. Its been implemented via the dcevm but, inexplicably, has been ignored by both sun and oracle. This one, existing technology would make Java DX on par with the dynamic languages

> The biggest thing Java is missing is full hot swap The biggest thing missing in Java is an answer for the billion-dollar mistake. Real world Java is plagued by NPEs because a lot of Java is written by low caliber programmers. Java + functional error handling would be a monumental improvement.

You could always try C#. They have a non-null compile mode where variables are non-nullable by default. They did the work to mark up core libraries and also have some pragmatic handling of olde nullable calls in 3rd party libraries.

Re: Don’t call it a comeback: Java is still champ

#79

Post by TrueDuality »

Scarbutt wrote: post #68
nocman wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To use anything else (than JavaSE without heavy deps.) on the server is madness. That's a terribly broad generalization. There are multiple other options that are entirely sane.

What other good dynamic runtimes with widespread use like the JVM exist?

Restricting your world view to only programming languages with dynamic runtime environments like the JVM is a major handicap.

Re: Don’t call it a comeback: Java is still champ

#80

Post by dehrmann »

pdntspa wrote: post #11

I recently started a side new project in Java targetting GraalVM with language version 17. Aside from Java's innate finickyness, it has been an unexpected pleasure. I think a lot of it has to do with its static typing (I typically work in dynamic languages, and it's nice knowing that if the program compiles it likely works), and how simple the language keeps its primitives. But you need really good tooling to use it,…

> But you need really good tooling to use it, like a powerful IDE with good autocompletion and refactor support. It is way too verbose to type everything out yourself, and the verbosity means manually refactoring takes lots of changes around the program to manifest.

One of the ironies of Java has been that its strictness and verbosity can make it hard to develop, but that strictness also enabled the development of powerful IDEs. What feels like a hassle for a 100 line file becomes an asset for a million-line project because of the safety, discoverability, and refactoring it enables.

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