←back to thread

Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

(thenewstack.io)
183 points chhum | 1 comments | 16 May 25 13:05 UTC | HN request time: 0.214s | source
Show context
exabrial ◴[16 May 25 14:51 UTC] No.44006194[source]▶
Java performance isn't the fastest, that's ok, a close 3rd place behind C/CPP ain't bad. And you're still ahead of Go, and 10x or more ahead of Python and Ruby.

Java syntax isn't perfect, but it is consistent, and predictable. And hey, if you're using an Idea or Eclipse (and not notepad, atom, etc), it's just pressing control-space all day and you're fine.

Java memory management seems weird from a Unix Philosophy POV, till you understand whats happening. Again, not perfect, but a good tradeoff.

What do you get for all of these tradeoffs? Speed, memory safety. But with that you still still have dynamic invocation capabilities (making things like interception possible) and hotswap/live redefinition (things that C/CPP cannot do).

Perfect? No, but very practical for the real world use case.

replies(14): >>44006269 #>>44006358 #>>44006411 #>>44006567 #>>44006570 #>>44006865 #>>44007100 #>>44007464 #>>44007662 #>>44007666 #>>44009121 #>>44009861 #>>44011219 #>>44011642 #
badc0ffee ◴[16 May 25 16:07 UTC] No.44007100[source]▶
> Java performance isn't the fastest, that's ok, a close 3rd place behind C/CPP ain't bad. And you're still ahead of Go, and 10x or more ahead of Python and Ruby.

Fastest at what, exactly?

replies(2): >>44007577 #>>44007661 #
1. briankelly ◴[16 May 25 17:02 UTC] No.44007661[source]▶
Having a hard time finding it now, but someone put together a benchmark with two categories - naive and optimized - comparing implementations across languages with a workload vaguely resembling a real-world business application server with a mix of long and short lived objects. Java was at the top of the naive benchmark by a landslide and behind C and C++ (edit: and probably Rust) for the optimized ranking, but with a gap before the rest of the field.

With the JVM you basically outsource all the work you need to do in C/C++ to optimize memory management and a typical developer is going to have a hell of a time beating it for non-trivial, heterogenous workloads. The main disadvantage (at least as I understand) is the memory overhead that Java objects incur which prevent it from being fully optimized the way you can with C/C++.