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Yup, the JVM is something that people (esp. startups & new-co's) are, all things being equal, vastly underusing or over-complaining about :). Before I started

Yup, the JVM is something that people (esp. startups & new-co's) are, all things being equal, vastly underusing or over-complaining about :). Before I started doing Clojure the JVM ecosystem was this "scary" thing but 4 years later I've learned to appreciate it a lot - stable AND sound libraries, high performance out-of-the box, and very,very high performance if you really need it.

hellofunk 10y ago
> very,very high performance if you really need it But not as high performance as Java directly. And typically not as high performance as native languages, which the author addresses.
- pron 10y ago
  There's absolutely nothing about native languages that makes them a-priori faster than the JVM. On the contrary, the JVMs compiler is likely to emit betteroptimized machine code than their compilers. Some low-level languages (like C/C++/Rust) can (and do in many cases) offer better performance, but that's not because they're "native" but because they allow (and require) finer control over every operation. This level of control comes at a significant cost, though.
  - hellofunk 10y ago
    Notice I said "typically" because, typically it is true that a native language runs faster than Clojure, which is what my comment was referring to.
agibsonccc 10y ago
What clojure and even scala do with the JVM scares me. The most concrete example I know of is using objects for everything. 1 of the fundamental problems I have with many of the higher level JVM languages is how much they hide from you. That being said, most people won't notice. I do numerical software in java so might be a bit more sensitive to some of this stuff.
- raspasov 10y ago
  If you ever have the need, checkout this blog post about optimizing math operations in Clojure http://insideclojure.org/2014/12/15/warn-on-boxed/ http://insideclojure.org/2014/12/15/warn-on-boxed/

hellofunk 10y ago

> very,very high performance if you really need it But not as high performance as Java directly. And typically not as high performance as native languages, which the author addresses.

pron 10y ago
There's absolutely nothing about native languages that makes them a-priori faster than the JVM. On the contrary, the JVMs compiler is likely to emit betteroptimized machine code than their compilers. Some low-level languages (like C/C++/Rust) can (and do in many cases) offer better performance, but that's not because they're "native" but because they allow (and require) finer control over every operation. This level of control comes at a significant cost, though.
- hellofunk 10y ago
  Notice I said "typically" because, typically it is true that a native language runs faster than Clojure, which is what my comment was referring to.

agibsonccc 10y ago

What clojure and even scala do with the JVM scares me. The most concrete example I know of is using objects for everything. 1 of the fundamental problems I have with many of the higher level JVM languages is how much they hide from you. That being said, most people won't notice. I do numerical software in java so might be a bit more sensitive to some of this stuff.

raspasov 10y ago
If you ever have the need, checkout this blog post about optimizing math operations in Clojure http://insideclojure.org/2014/12/15/warn-on-boxed/ http://insideclojure.org/2014/12/15/warn-on-boxed/