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Great stuff! Devs often complain about Java being boring and old-school, but it never ceases to amaze me how cool Java and Java-related techs are (JDK, JVM, GC

by kovrik 8y ago

Great stuff! Devs often complain about Java being boring and old-school, but it never ceases to amaze me how cool Java and Java-related techs are (JDK, JVM, GC etc.)! Literally, state of the art, almost alien technology. And it seems that more cool stuff is coming.

headius 8y ago
There's always more cool stuff! I'm hoping to leverage more and more of the work being done for Graal and Truffle in standard JRuby over the next year. Keep an eye out for Graal-specific improvements in JRuby releases soon.
bad_user 8y ago
There are also alternative languages flourishing on top of the JVM. Besides JRuby mentioned in TFA, there are awesome languages you can use like Scala, Clojure, Kotlin or even Haskell [0], all enabled by a runtime that proved to be truly multi-language, as in alternative languages are not just superficial syntactic sugar for Java (like CoffeeScript is for JS, or VB.NET is for C#). Every time I have to use Java, the language, I hate it, however those languages are not Java, yet can leverage the decades of knowledge, libraries and tools built on top of the JVM. It's a little funny in retrospective, I remember Microsoft's marketing in early 2000 and .NET developers were saying "Java is single language, multi-platform and .NET is multi-language, single-platform". Nowadays both statements are false. [0] https://eta-lang.org https://eta-lang.org
- kovrik 8y ago
  True! Personally, I'm in love with Kotlin. But also like Clojure. However, it is really nice to see that Java itself is getting better and better each release.
DannyBee 8y ago
Err, the partially flow sensitive escape analysis talked about here is a generally decades old technique. The only interesting part is making it practical for JITs by being able to choose which branches to care about. And honestly, while well thought out and engineered, it hardly qualifies as almost alien technology. The thesis it's based on points out there are no published papers covering exactly this technique, but are in fact two other production implementations that do basically the same thing (luajit and pypy) that exist. That's usually a really good sign that what you've done is not that novel (in the sense of being straightforward to those in the world) even if it is really good engineering.

by kovrik 8y ago

headius 8y ago

There's always more cool stuff! I'm hoping to leverage more and more of the work being done for Graal and Truffle in standard JRuby over the next year. Keep an eye out for Graal-specific improvements in JRuby releases soon.

bad_user 8y ago

There are also alternative languages flourishing on top of the JVM. Besides JRuby mentioned in TFA, there are awesome languages you can use like Scala, Clojure, Kotlin or even Haskell [0], all enabled by a runtime that proved to be truly multi-language, as in alternative languages are not just superficial syntactic sugar for Java (like CoffeeScript is for JS, or VB.NET is for C#). Every time I have to use Java, the language, I hate it, however those languages are not Java, yet can leverage the decades of knowledge, libraries and tools built on top of the JVM. It's a little funny in retrospective, I remember Microsoft's marketing in early 2000 and .NET developers were saying "Java is single language, multi-platform and .NET is multi-language, single-platform". Nowadays both statements are false. [0] https://eta-lang.org https://eta-lang.org

kovrik 8y ago
True! Personally, I'm in love with Kotlin. But also like Clojure. However, it is really nice to see that Java itself is getting better and better each release.

DannyBee 8y ago

Err, the partially flow sensitive escape analysis talked about here is a generally decades old technique. The only interesting part is making it practical for JITs by being able to choose which branches to care about. And honestly, while well thought out and engineered, it hardly qualifies as almost alien technology. The thesis it's based on points out there are no published papers covering exactly this technique, but are in fact two other production implementations that do basically the same thing (luajit and pypy) that exist. That's usually a really good sign that what you've done is not that novel (in the sense of being straightforward to those in the world) even if it is really good engineering.