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Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

(thenewstack.io)
177 points chhum | 2 comments | 16 May 25 13:05 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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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.

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znpy ◴[16 May 25 15:03 UTC] No.44006358[source]▶
> Java memory management seems weird from a Unix Philosophy POV, till you understand whats happening. Again, not perfect, but a good tradeoff.

The GC story is just great, however. Pretty much the best you can get in the entire ecosystem of managed-memory languages.

You have different GC algorithms implemented, and you can pick and tune the one that best fits your use-case.

The elephant in the room is of course ZGC, which has been delivering great improvements in lowering the Stop-the-world GC pauses. I've seen it consistently deliver sub-millisecond pauses whereas other algorithms would usually do 40-60 msec.

Needless to say, you can also write GC-free code, if you need that. It's not really advertised, but it's feasible.

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1. neonsunset ◴[16 May 25 17:06 UTC] No.44007698{3}[source]▶
> Needless to say, you can also write GC-free code, if you need that. It's not really advertised, but it's feasible.

It is not feasible under the JVM type system. Even once Valhalla gets released it will carry restrictions that will keep that highly impractical.

It's much less needed with ZGC but even the poster child C# from the GC-based language family when it comes to writing allocation-free and zero-cost abstraction code presents challenges the second you need to use code written by someone who does not care as much about performance.

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2. zdragnar ◴[17 May 25 01:01 UTC] No.44011208[source]▶
Zero-allocation (obviously different from zero GC) frameworks made a bit of a splash a little while back, but I'm not seeing much about them anymore from a brief search. I would have sworn that quarkus was one of them, but it looks like that's definitely not the case anymore.

The downside is that you sacrifice a lot of the benefits of guard rails of the language and tooling for what may not end up being much savings, depending on your workload.