Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

I personally appreciate Java (and the JVM) much more after having tried other languages/ecosystems that people kept saying were so much better than Java. Instead, I just felt like it was a "the grass is greener" every time. The only other language that I felt was an actual massive improvement is Rust (which so far has been a joy to work with).

It's a shame imo that it's not seen as a "cool" option for startups, because at this point, the productivity gap compared to other languages is small, if nonexistent.

Funny. I've been trying rust for the past 2 months fulltime, and i'm really wondering how you can call it a "joy to work with" when compared to java, at least for server development.

Rust feels like walking on a minefield, praying to never meet any lifetime problem that's going to ruin your afternoon productivity ( recently lost an afternoon on something that could very well be a known compiler bug, but on a method with such a horrible signature that i never can be sure. in the end i recoded the thing with macros instead).

The feeling of typesafety is satisfying , i agree. But calling the overall experience a "joy" ?

You eventually learn you leverage lifetimes. You just need to get over that point in the learning curve. I very rarely run into those types of issues, and it's very freeing knowing that I can write libraries that are so hard to misuse because you can leverage the type system.

And macros are a part of that!

Why do I need to? Why can't I let the garbage collector deal with it?

Rust's macros on the other hand are excellent, and more languages should have expressive macros like that.

> Why do I need to? Why can't I let the garbage collector deal with it?

Determinism.

With Rust lifetimes, you can statically prove when resources will be released. Garbage collectors provide no such guarantees. It has been shown that garbage-collected languages have a space-performance tradeoff: you need five times as much RAM to achieve the same performance, even with a "good" GC, as the same program with explicit memory management:

https://people.cs.umass.edu/~emery/pubs/gcvsmalloc.pdf