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I don't understand why these "people who want to do things without the JVM are wrong and deluded" articles never seem to even acknowledge that not everyone migh

by 4bpp 9y ago

I don't understand why these "people who want to do things without the JVM are wrong and deluded" articles never seem to even acknowledge that not everyone might want to go through the trouble of installing and configuring a JVM to begin with (and so the comparison they make is between "compile and run native code" and "compile and run java -jar soandso"). Being on an apparently second-class platform (Linux), every forced encounter with GUI-enabled Java applications in recent memory for me (Mathematica, MATLAB...) resulted in having to spend days picking apart esoteric JVM issues to do with everything ranging from hardware acceleration to font rendering to native library interfaces which apparently keep popping up every year in such a way that the previous year's Stack Overflow fixes no longer do anything. Adding to that the hairiness of having to deal with concurrent versions (often the system's versus what was included with the software package) and how even distro-official JRE packages usually follow the "postinst script executes installer, installer downloads a blob and covers the whole system in untracked goo" format, I'm usually very relieved to scrub my system of all traces of Java after I am done with whatever forced me to install it.

jackmott 9y ago
There just seems to be some people who don't think having to install large runtimes, potentially specific versions of them, to make your app run, is a problem. I don't understand them either. Perhaps they are focused on server software and so don't think about client/end user scenarios much.
michel-slm 9y ago
yeah, that's why in a previous job I try to stick to OpenJDK even though IntelliJ would warn that it might not be fully compatible. At least it's built and packaged by the distro so it does not leave a mess on the filesystem.
mike_hearn 9y ago
The churn problem with Linux GUI libraries is more of a problem with Linux than Java. I used to use Linux and non-Java apps often had the same issues unless they were directly distributed by KDE or GNOME. For instance Wine tended to suffer badly from random font and library issues caused by distros skewing things in incompatible ways.

by 4bpp 9y ago

jackmott 9y ago

There just seems to be some people who don't think having to install large runtimes, potentially specific versions of them, to make your app run, is a problem. I don't understand them either. Perhaps they are focused on server software and so don't think about client/end user scenarios much.

michel-slm 9y ago

yeah, that's why in a previous job I try to stick to OpenJDK even though IntelliJ would warn that it might not be fully compatible. At least it's built and packaged by the distro so it does not leave a mess on the filesystem.

mike_hearn 9y ago

The churn problem with Linux GUI libraries is more of a problem with Linux than Java. I used to use Linux and non-Java apps often had the same issues unless they were directly distributed by KDE or GNOME. For instance Wine tended to suffer badly from random font and library issues caused by distros skewing things in incompatible ways.