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Whenever I read posts like this I feel like two technologies are being portrayed as combatants in an epic war over the years, with engineers taking sides and fi

Whenever I read posts like this I feel like two technologies are being portrayed as combatants in an epic war over the years, with engineers taking sides and firing shots at each other. In reality I think technologies are just tools which have their appropriate and inappropriate uses. Both AOT and JIT have their strengths and weaknesses, and engineers make their choices based on those tradeoffs. With the linked article, it sounds like the startup time tradeoff is being used as the main motivation for making a change, probably because mobile users are more sensitive to this. That doesn't mean JIT fundamentally sucks - it's worked pretty well on the web with Javascript, for example.

JustSomeNobody 11y ago
You're wrong. It is a battle. Look at how quickly the swords come out when anyone brings up C# and Java or Python and Ruby or Backbone and Angular. Any discussion involving developers and the tech they use quickly devolves into all out verbal conflict. People LOVE to argue about this stuff because it gives them something to do besides actually doing anything productive. It's all rather sickening, really.
- mahouse 11y ago
  How do you dare living your life doing something entertaining rather than doing something productive? To the gas chamber with you!
  - JustSomeNobody 11y ago
    HAHA! I see what you did there! But you missed my point.
- Echoic 11y ago
  With your comment, I would think the correct course of action would be not commenting at all in the discussion. But, I guess you don't have anything 'productive' to do.
  - JustSomeNobody 11y ago
    Being able to have an objective discussion of the appropriate uses of one technology over another is very productive. I, in no way, said anything contrary to that. But meaningful discussions are rare because they devolve so quickly.
- Roboprog 11y ago
  Java: the expressiveness of an Algol subset with the performance of a Lisp. :-) C#/.NET being a slightly improved Java and all. I love interpreters with automatic memory management. I love assembler (sort of). It's painful when the wrong one gets put in the wrong place, though.
- AshleysBrain 11y ago
  Well, technologies don't battle (except in the marketplace, which often shows the success of both), but some engineers battle over them. Meanwhile, wiser engineers are calmly choosing their technologies based on their suitability to the task at hand, instead of starting arguments over an all-or-nothing mentality.
  - bunderbunder 11y ago
    There's the rub, I think. Historically the big managed platforms have offered some real advantages. JIT compilation has been a part of that, since it helps to some of the reflective features that have in turn supported some useful tools for increasing developer productivity such as aspect-oriented programming, object-relational mapping and mocking. These gains may have come at the cost of raw execution times, but most of the core consumers of the technology measure their success in terms of dollars, and are in the privileged position of being able to offset the performance losses by upgrading their servers. For them this is a perfectly sensible decision. Developers are much more expensive than computers, so they were simply being pound wise and penny foolish. In other environments the calculus has been different. Console games have always had constrained resources, a homogeneous target environment, and high performance demands. Correspondingly, AOT's always been how things are done int hat domain. Sometimes it's even changed over time. Bytecode made a lot of sense for mobile development a decade ago, back when there were relatively many competing hardware platforms and people interacted with their phones differently. Nowadays there are fewer more homogeneous platforms and do more task switching, so the cost of AOT compilation has gone down and the potential benefits have gone up. Hence this shift in .NET, which perhaps seems even more sudden since .NET itself was primarily targeted at enterprise development until relatively recently.
    - fyolnish 11y ago
      Console games use interpreted (not even JITed) Lua quite a lot for the areas where iteration time is of most importance. As the parent said, wiser engineers just choose the best tech for the task.
0xFFC 11y ago
The things you are talking is correct, Two technology should be just technology , but in real world I don't think so , companies tend to sell their technology as some kind of magical power and revivals wants to show other companies technology is just crap . But what you are saying is mostly true in academia or ideal world , but not in reality .
- gaius 11y ago
  See also CISC vs RISC.
eloff 11y ago
This is a kind of wishy washy liberal attitude that is found all over. An attempt to say both sides of an argument have a point. Which is always true, otherwise there wouldn't be an argument. The part I take umbrage at is that it implies both sides have an equally valid argument. That is rarely true. Here JIT has been claiming superiority for twenty years. It has clearly failed. It's slower to start, slower to run, and uses more memory. That will very probably never change. It still has some advantages in some areas and some niches, but AOT has won. The war, if you really must use that term, is over. We see this in the resurgence of interest in C++ and in the move in mobile ecosystems to AOT.

JustSomeNobody 11y ago

You're wrong. It is a battle. Look at how quickly the swords come out when anyone brings up C# and Java or Python and Ruby or Backbone and Angular. Any discussion involving developers and the tech they use quickly devolves into all out verbal conflict. People LOVE to argue about this stuff because it gives them something to do besides actually doing anything productive. It's all rather sickening, really.

mahouse 11y ago
How do you dare living your life doing something entertaining rather than doing something productive? To the gas chamber with you!
- JustSomeNobody 11y ago
  HAHA! I see what you did there! But you missed my point.
Echoic 11y ago
With your comment, I would think the correct course of action would be not commenting at all in the discussion. But, I guess you don't have anything 'productive' to do.
- JustSomeNobody 11y ago
  Being able to have an objective discussion of the appropriate uses of one technology over another is very productive. I, in no way, said anything contrary to that. But meaningful discussions are rare because they devolve so quickly.
Roboprog 11y ago
Java: the expressiveness of an Algol subset with the performance of a Lisp. :-) C#/.NET being a slightly improved Java and all. I love interpreters with automatic memory management. I love assembler (sort of). It's painful when the wrong one gets put in the wrong place, though.
AshleysBrain 11y ago
Well, technologies don't battle (except in the marketplace, which often shows the success of both), but some engineers battle over them. Meanwhile, wiser engineers are calmly choosing their technologies based on their suitability to the task at hand, instead of starting arguments over an all-or-nothing mentality.
- bunderbunder 11y ago
  There's the rub, I think. Historically the big managed platforms have offered some real advantages. JIT compilation has been a part of that, since it helps to some of the reflective features that have in turn supported some useful tools for increasing developer productivity such as aspect-oriented programming, object-relational mapping and mocking. These gains may have come at the cost of raw execution times, but most of the core consumers of the technology measure their success in terms of dollars, and are in the privileged position of being able to offset the performance losses by upgrading their servers. For them this is a perfectly sensible decision. Developers are much more expensive than computers, so they were simply being pound wise and penny foolish. In other environments the calculus has been different. Console games have always had constrained resources, a homogeneous target environment, and high performance demands. Correspondingly, AOT's always been how things are done int hat domain. Sometimes it's even changed over time. Bytecode made a lot of sense for mobile development a decade ago, back when there were relatively many competing hardware platforms and people interacted with their phones differently. Nowadays there are fewer more homogeneous platforms and do more task switching, so the cost of AOT compilation has gone down and the potential benefits have gone up. Hence this shift in .NET, which perhaps seems even more sudden since .NET itself was primarily targeted at enterprise development until relatively recently.
  - fyolnish 11y ago
    Console games use interpreted (not even JITed) Lua quite a lot for the areas where iteration time is of most importance. As the parent said, wiser engineers just choose the best tech for the task.

0xFFC 11y ago

The things you are talking is correct, Two technology should be just technology , but in real world I don't think so , companies tend to sell their technology as some kind of magical power and revivals wants to show other companies technology is just crap . But what you are saying is mostly true in academia or ideal world , but not in reality .

gaius 11y ago
See also CISC vs RISC.

eloff 11y ago

This is a kind of wishy washy liberal attitude that is found all over. An attempt to say both sides of an argument have a point. Which is always true, otherwise there wouldn't be an argument. The part I take umbrage at is that it implies both sides have an equally valid argument. That is rarely true. Here JIT has been claiming superiority for twenty years. It has clearly failed. It's slower to start, slower to run, and uses more memory. That will very probably never change. It still has some advantages in some areas and some niches, but AOT has won. The war, if you really must use that term, is over. We see this in the resurgence of interest in C++ and in the move in mobile ecosystems to AOT.