8 ms·

Too little too late, and I highly doubt that (5-year-old) Valhalla will deliver even one of the promised features (value types) in the next 3 years. Remember th

by dtech 7y ago

Too little too late, and I highly doubt that (5-year-old) Valhalla will deliver even one of the promised features (value types) in the next 3 years. Remember that the original plan was to have all Valhalla features in Java 10. Java/JVM was in the ideal position to dominate the software world for the whole 21th century 15 years ago. Instead they did an IE6 and stagnated for so long that their competitors became plain better. I'd say Java/JVM is now where IE was in 2008. Still massive majority market share, but in decline because people are switching to competitors. LLVM and webassembly are eating JVM's cake, and a multitude of languages like Kotlin, C#, Go, Rust and even Javascript and Python are chipping away at Java's market share.

walkingolof 7y ago
Kotlin is a JVM language, sold as a better Java, and the JVM is really the thing that is the echo system gathers around, not necessarily the language Java. Other interesting languages you have on the JVM is Scala (multi-paradigm), Clojure (Lisp), EtaLang (Haskell) - https://eta-lang.org https://eta-lang.org - https://www.scala-lang.org https://www.scala-lang.org - https://kotlinlang.org https://kotlinlang.org - https://clojure.org https://clojure.org
- dtech 7y ago
  Notice how I separately addressed JVM and Java. Java is already losing market share to JVM competitor languages. JVM is in a stronger position than Java, but imagine a world were 15-10 years ago native compilation for JVM bytecode became available instead of 1 year ago. LLVM wouldn't have stood a chance. Kotlin and Scala (I'm not too familiar with Clojure and others) are hedging their bets and making JS/Webassembly and LLVM versions.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    JVM native compilation exists since 2000 for anyone willing to pay for it.
    - aphexairlines 7y ago
      Do you mean with Excelsior JET? I tried to compile an application totaling 157MB in jars to native with it just now. After compiling for 2 hours it was still only 15% done. I had aggressive optimizations disabled.
      - pjmlp 7y ago
        Excelsior JET is only one among many. As for your problem, it looks very strange to me, only similar to compiling C and C++ on underpowered hardware.
        ptx 7y ago
        Which are the other ones? I know of GCJ, which is dead, and Graal, which from what I hear takes hours to compile small programs.
        pjmlp 7y ago
        Most commercial JVMs for embedded development. For example, PTC, Aicas, Aonix (now also owned by PTC), IBM RealTime WebSphere, some variants of J9, Android since version 5 (although it isn't technically a JVM), RobotVM, Codename ONE, GluonVM, IBM i JVM (uses OS/400 TIMI), JRockit.
  - fnordsensei 7y ago
    I know for a fact that in the case of Clojure (and I assume the reasoning is similar for Kotlin and Scala) that targeting other ecosystems has nothing to do with "hedging", and everything to do with reaching other platforms and mediums.
  - repolfx 7y ago
    LLVM would have been created even if free/open source, SubstrateVM style tech existed back then because LLVM was designed as a competitor to GCC for compiling C and C++. The JVM can run C/C++ code these days 'natively' (by JIT compiling LLVM bitcode using Sulong) but that's not what it was created to do. Also bear in mind LLVM is not really a JVM competitor despite the name. LLVM is a toolkit for building compilers, primarily, C/C++ compilers. Other languages that targeted it have had to do a lot of work to change LLVM for that language. It's not actually a "VM" in the JVM or V8 sense, for instance, it doesn't provide a garbage collector and LLVM bitcode is neither platform neutral nor a stable format.
    - dtech 7y ago
      > Also bear in mind LLVM is not really a JVM competitor despite the name. LLVM is a toolkit for building compilers It started out as a (lower-level than JVM) VM and evolved into what it is now, mainly because of Apple's requirements and funding.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    >Java is already losing market share to JVM competitor languages. Really, any examples? And not Go and Rust (down 30+ places in the TIOBE index compared to Java, and as insignificant as to not even exist in the global job market).
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
threeseed 7y ago
Kotlin runs on JVM and needs Java to even bootstrap. And the idea that corporate developers or even frankly any developers are switching to LLVM and WebAssembly en masse is pretty ridiculous. Java as a language may be getting less developer interest but Scala, Clojure and Kotlin are as strong as ever.
- Ologn 7y ago
  Kotlin can run on the JVM and, Kotlin-on-the-JVM needs Java to even bootstrap. Also it seems that most of the interest for Kotlin comes from the JVM community and this aspect of the language. That is certainly the case for Android programmers any how. Backend JVM application server programmers use it as well. However Kotlin can be targeted to other platforms as well. Kotlin can target JavaScript ( https://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/js-overview.html https://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/js-overview.html ). Also the Kotlin compiler has a LLVM based backend which can compile native binaries, without use of any VM ( https://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/native-overview.html https://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/native-overview.html ). My main non-JVM use of Kotlin is that when I want to use some arcane aspect of Kotlin, which I may not be too familiar with, I might write and test a small toy function on the command line using it and then copying it over to a big Android Kotlin project, as opposed to trying to work out how to use the arcane feature in the middle of a big Android project.
  - foobarian 7y ago
    To me two things about Kotlin stand out over all other Java alternatives: 1) fantastic IDE support and 2) it does not add too much rope to hang oneself with (see re: Scala).
StevePerkins 7y ago
> webassembly [is] eating JVM's cake It's hard for me to take all the "Java is dying" threads seriously when they don't even seem to understand where Java plays. Webassembly? Really? That's a client-side tech, and 99.999% of Java devs ceded the browser battleground pre-9/11. Java's bread and butter is EAI, ETL, and server-side business application development. Particularly with pieces requiring heavily distributed design. Node might pick away at some of the lowest-hanging fruit (e.g. JavaScript webdevs writing their own REST endpoints to fetch user settings from the database). But most of that crowd doesn't understand what the terms "EAI" or "ETL" even mean. Hell, most of that crowd has never had the experience of working for a company that turns a profit. The next major downturn will be interesting to watch... And JavaScript is the only JVM-alternative to take seriously at all. Hype trains come and go for Rust, .NET Core, Go, etc. But they never really gain serious traction beyond a non-Java niche area, and/or devolve into endless arguments about generics or whatever. I've seen zero actual encroachment into anything that earns me money for the past 10 years now, and at this point I'll probably be retired before I have to worry about it.
- aphexairlines 7y ago
  You're right that Java is entrenched in a lot of the enterprise space, but I think you're being quick to dismiss entrants that have gained steam in the last few years. For example, Go is becoming the default in Kubernetes applications. It's eating tech companies that became large in the last few years like Lyft and Uber. It'll spread to other large tech companies like Amazon or IBM with ease. It will possibly get picked up by a significant number of universities for undergrad courses within a few years as well.
  - StevePerkins 7y ago
    Seriously, people. K8s is a container orchestration system. Yes, it's written in Go, like Docker itself. DevOps tooling is a niche area where Go has been very successful. But k8s runs whatever you put into your Docker containers. I've seen no indication of it changing which languages people choose to containerize (Node containers probably being way more common than Go ones). If anything, easy containerization negates one of Go's strongest selling points (i.e. standalone executables with no need for a runtime environment).
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
altfredd 7y ago
> Too little too late, and I highly doubt that (5-year-old) Valhalla will deliver even one of the promised features (value types) in the next 3 years I never understood the purpose of Valhalla. They should just introduce a 128-bit scalar type and call it a day. Nobody actually cares about automagically storing value types in HashMap — all interested parties (HFT, computing) have already written dedicated collection libraries for working with primitives, and those libraries have little in common with object-based ones. > LLVM and webassembly are eating JVM's cake pffft, hahahaha, no they don't. JVM and LLVM don't even share same market niche — one is a feature-complete runtime, another is a "make-your-own-language" build kit. Webassembly? What webassembly?
- needusername 7y ago
  > Nobody actually cares about automagically storing value types in HashMap I agree. When I look at the allocation profiles and heaps of our Java applications (which I assume to be fairly typical Java enterprise applications) boxed types do not show up. What really matters are Strings, both in the heap and the allocations.
coldtea 7y ago
>webassembly are eating JVM's cake Nobody seriously uses webassembly outside of the web broswer. So much for hyperbole.
pron 7y ago
> I highly doubt that (5-year-old) Valhalla will deliver even one of the promised features (value types) in the next 3 years. I'll gladly take that bet. People said the same about lambdas. > Java/JVM was in the ideal position to dominate the software world for the whole 21th century 15 years ago. Instead they did an IE6 and stagnated for so long that their competitors became plain better. I don't see any competitor coming anywhere near Java on technical merits. Not only is there no stagnation, but true breakthroughs -- in GC, compilation and observability are being made in Java and almost nowhere else in the past few years. That's not to say that Java doesn't have some glaring deficiencies but they're being addressed. Are they being addressed too slowly? Perhaps, but that's something we've heard about Java for a long time, and the perception has usually turned out wrong. I think this is because such complaints are made by HN readership that misunderstand the industry's priorities. > LLVM and webassembly are eating JVM's cake, and a multitude of languages like Kotlin, C#, Go, Rust and even Javascript and Python are chipping away at Java's market share. Java's short-lived complete domination was a fluke. Now its market share represents a more normal one for a technological leader. LLVM and webassembly are eating the JVM's cake only on HN. Kotlin shares well over 90% of its code with Java, and is a part of the Java ecosystem. C# has always been a big competitor, and Rust is not really chipping much away from Java as it's optimized for different domains. Go certainly took a bite, but its rise has stalled. This leaves JS and Python. JS has truly been a remarkable success due to its ubiquity on the browser, and it has taken a big bite out of all languages. Python is the most interesting one in the bunch. It is nowhere near as technologically advanced as Java, but it has other important benefits that many companies now care about.
sonnyblarney 7y ago
"LLVM and webassembly are eating JVM's cake," > webassembly is not eating any cake. And C++ is still around, and one of the top choices, despite 25 years of other languages chipping away at it. Java is very mature, it doesn't need to evolve a whole lot - and most everything you need is there. Oracle is definitely a risk to this, but I don't see TS/JS/Node taking over. Kotlin is a strategic choice by Google due to Oracle woes, otherwise it would be a very rare language: consider that it really hasn't made a big roar outside of Android, i.e. it's not really anywhere on server side. Java isn't going anywhere for a while yet. There will need to be some kind of tectonic shift for this to happen. If Google or AWS for example fully embrace some new thing, that might do it - but I don't see what the candidate is.
- erik_seaberg 7y ago
  Kotlin for JVM has a lot of potential. It takes a lot of the pointless busywork out of Java (this is Go's problem), yet the median hiring candidate can probably handle it (this is Scala's problem) and you don't sacrifice decades of library coverage.
  - sonnyblarney 7y ago
    Kotlin is nice, but to me it's mostly just 'different', not necessarily an 'advantage'. Without Android adoption (and G did this specifically because of Oracle issues) I don't think anyone would really be using it. Outside of Android, it's not a big thing. I've gone Java to Kotlin and back again simply because the few advantages to Kotlin just aren't worth the phase shift. FYI almost every single code example in Android has Kotlin and Java the same length. It's not really any shorter or more concise in the end. I wish Kotlin well, and it's a great example of how the JVM can be leveraged. The JVM is probably Java's greatest foundational asset, which is why Graal has such potential, if Oracle doesn't screw it up ...
pawelmurias 7y ago
> even Javascript and Python are chipping away at Java's market share. The GraalVM team is working to run a bunch of stuff all together on the JVM

by dtech 7y ago

walkingolof 7y ago

Kotlin is a JVM language, sold as a better Java, and the JVM is really the thing that is the echo system gathers around, not necessarily the language Java. Other interesting languages you have on the JVM is Scala (multi-paradigm), Clojure (Lisp), EtaLang (Haskell) - https://eta-lang.org https://eta-lang.org - https://www.scala-lang.org https://www.scala-lang.org - https://kotlinlang.org https://kotlinlang.org - https://clojure.org https://clojure.org

dtech 7y ago
Notice how I separately addressed JVM and Java. Java is already losing market share to JVM competitor languages. JVM is in a stronger position than Java, but imagine a world were 15-10 years ago native compilation for JVM bytecode became available instead of 1 year ago. LLVM wouldn't have stood a chance. Kotlin and Scala (I'm not too familiar with Clojure and others) are hedging their bets and making JS/Webassembly and LLVM versions.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  JVM native compilation exists since 2000 for anyone willing to pay for it.
  - aphexairlines 7y ago
    Do you mean with Excelsior JET? I tried to compile an application totaling 157MB in jars to native with it just now. After compiling for 2 hours it was still only 15% done. I had aggressive optimizations disabled.
    - pjmlp 7y ago
      Excelsior JET is only one among many. As for your problem, it looks very strange to me, only similar to compiling C and C++ on underpowered hardware.
      - ptx 7y ago
        Which are the other ones? I know of GCJ, which is dead, and Graal, which from what I hear takes hours to compile small programs.
        pjmlp 7y ago
        Most commercial JVMs for embedded development. For example, PTC, Aicas, Aonix (now also owned by PTC), IBM RealTime WebSphere, some variants of J9, Android since version 5 (although it isn't technically a JVM), RobotVM, Codename ONE, GluonVM, IBM i JVM (uses OS/400 TIMI), JRockit.
- fnordsensei 7y ago
  I know for a fact that in the case of Clojure (and I assume the reasoning is similar for Kotlin and Scala) that targeting other ecosystems has nothing to do with "hedging", and everything to do with reaching other platforms and mediums.
- repolfx 7y ago
  LLVM would have been created even if free/open source, SubstrateVM style tech existed back then because LLVM was designed as a competitor to GCC for compiling C and C++. The JVM can run C/C++ code these days 'natively' (by JIT compiling LLVM bitcode using Sulong) but that's not what it was created to do. Also bear in mind LLVM is not really a JVM competitor despite the name. LLVM is a toolkit for building compilers, primarily, C/C++ compilers. Other languages that targeted it have had to do a lot of work to change LLVM for that language. It's not actually a "VM" in the JVM or V8 sense, for instance, it doesn't provide a garbage collector and LLVM bitcode is neither platform neutral nor a stable format.
  - dtech 7y ago
    > Also bear in mind LLVM is not really a JVM competitor despite the name. LLVM is a toolkit for building compilers It started out as a (lower-level than JVM) VM and evolved into what it is now, mainly because of Apple's requirements and funding.
- coldtea 7y ago
  >Java is already losing market share to JVM competitor languages. Really, any examples? And not Go and Rust (down 30+ places in the TIOBE index compared to Java, and as insignificant as to not even exist in the global job market).
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

threeseed 7y ago

Kotlin runs on JVM and needs Java to even bootstrap. And the idea that corporate developers or even frankly any developers are switching to LLVM and WebAssembly en masse is pretty ridiculous. Java as a language may be getting less developer interest but Scala, Clojure and Kotlin are as strong as ever.

Ologn 7y ago
Kotlin can run on the JVM and, Kotlin-on-the-JVM needs Java to even bootstrap. Also it seems that most of the interest for Kotlin comes from the JVM community and this aspect of the language. That is certainly the case for Android programmers any how. Backend JVM application server programmers use it as well. However Kotlin can be targeted to other platforms as well. Kotlin can target JavaScript ( https://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/js-overview.html https://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/js-overview.html ). Also the Kotlin compiler has a LLVM based backend which can compile native binaries, without use of any VM ( https://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/native-overview.html https://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/native-overview.html ). My main non-JVM use of Kotlin is that when I want to use some arcane aspect of Kotlin, which I may not be too familiar with, I might write and test a small toy function on the command line using it and then copying it over to a big Android Kotlin project, as opposed to trying to work out how to use the arcane feature in the middle of a big Android project.
- foobarian 7y ago
  To me two things about Kotlin stand out over all other Java alternatives: 1) fantastic IDE support and 2) it does not add too much rope to hang oneself with (see re: Scala).

StevePerkins 7y ago

> webassembly [is] eating JVM's cake It's hard for me to take all the "Java is dying" threads seriously when they don't even seem to understand where Java plays. Webassembly? Really? That's a client-side tech, and 99.999% of Java devs ceded the browser battleground pre-9/11. Java's bread and butter is EAI, ETL, and server-side business application development. Particularly with pieces requiring heavily distributed design. Node might pick away at some of the lowest-hanging fruit (e.g. JavaScript webdevs writing their own REST endpoints to fetch user settings from the database). But most of that crowd doesn't understand what the terms "EAI" or "ETL" even mean. Hell, most of that crowd has never had the experience of working for a company that turns a profit. The next major downturn will be interesting to watch... And JavaScript is the only JVM-alternative to take seriously at all. Hype trains come and go for Rust, .NET Core, Go, etc. But they never really gain serious traction beyond a non-Java niche area, and/or devolve into endless arguments about generics or whatever. I've seen zero actual encroachment into anything that earns me money for the past 10 years now, and at this point I'll probably be retired before I have to worry about it.

aphexairlines 7y ago
You're right that Java is entrenched in a lot of the enterprise space, but I think you're being quick to dismiss entrants that have gained steam in the last few years. For example, Go is becoming the default in Kubernetes applications. It's eating tech companies that became large in the last few years like Lyft and Uber. It'll spread to other large tech companies like Amazon or IBM with ease. It will possibly get picked up by a significant number of universities for undergrad courses within a few years as well.
- StevePerkins 7y ago
  Seriously, people. K8s is a container orchestration system. Yes, it's written in Go, like Docker itself. DevOps tooling is a niche area where Go has been very successful. But k8s runs whatever you put into your Docker containers. I've seen no indication of it changing which languages people choose to containerize (Node containers probably being way more common than Go ones). If anything, easy containerization negates one of Go's strongest selling points (i.e. standalone executables with no need for a runtime environment).

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

altfredd 7y ago

> Too little too late, and I highly doubt that (5-year-old) Valhalla will deliver even one of the promised features (value types) in the next 3 years I never understood the purpose of Valhalla. They should just introduce a 128-bit scalar type and call it a day. Nobody actually cares about automagically storing value types in HashMap — all interested parties (HFT, computing) have already written dedicated collection libraries for working with primitives, and those libraries have little in common with object-based ones. > LLVM and webassembly are eating JVM's cake pffft, hahahaha, no they don't. JVM and LLVM don't even share same market niche — one is a feature-complete runtime, another is a "make-your-own-language" build kit. Webassembly? What webassembly?

needusername 7y ago
> Nobody actually cares about automagically storing value types in HashMap I agree. When I look at the allocation profiles and heaps of our Java applications (which I assume to be fairly typical Java enterprise applications) boxed types do not show up. What really matters are Strings, both in the heap and the allocations.

coldtea 7y ago

>webassembly are eating JVM's cake Nobody seriously uses webassembly outside of the web broswer. So much for hyperbole.

pron 7y ago

> I highly doubt that (5-year-old) Valhalla will deliver even one of the promised features (value types) in the next 3 years. I'll gladly take that bet. People said the same about lambdas. > Java/JVM was in the ideal position to dominate the software world for the whole 21th century 15 years ago. Instead they did an IE6 and stagnated for so long that their competitors became plain better. I don't see any competitor coming anywhere near Java on technical merits. Not only is there no stagnation, but true breakthroughs -- in GC, compilation and observability are being made in Java and almost nowhere else in the past few years. That's not to say that Java doesn't have some glaring deficiencies but they're being addressed. Are they being addressed too slowly? Perhaps, but that's something we've heard about Java for a long time, and the perception has usually turned out wrong. I think this is because such complaints are made by HN readership that misunderstand the industry's priorities. > LLVM and webassembly are eating JVM's cake, and a multitude of languages like Kotlin, C#, Go, Rust and even Javascript and Python are chipping away at Java's market share. Java's short-lived complete domination was a fluke. Now its market share represents a more normal one for a technological leader. LLVM and webassembly are eating the JVM's cake only on HN. Kotlin shares well over 90% of its code with Java, and is a part of the Java ecosystem. C# has always been a big competitor, and Rust is not really chipping much away from Java as it's optimized for different domains. Go certainly took a bite, but its rise has stalled. This leaves JS and Python. JS has truly been a remarkable success due to its ubiquity on the browser, and it has taken a big bite out of all languages. Python is the most interesting one in the bunch. It is nowhere near as technologically advanced as Java, but it has other important benefits that many companies now care about.

sonnyblarney 7y ago

"LLVM and webassembly are eating JVM's cake," > webassembly is not eating any cake. And C++ is still around, and one of the top choices, despite 25 years of other languages chipping away at it. Java is very mature, it doesn't need to evolve a whole lot - and most everything you need is there. Oracle is definitely a risk to this, but I don't see TS/JS/Node taking over. Kotlin is a strategic choice by Google due to Oracle woes, otherwise it would be a very rare language: consider that it really hasn't made a big roar outside of Android, i.e. it's not really anywhere on server side. Java isn't going anywhere for a while yet. There will need to be some kind of tectonic shift for this to happen. If Google or AWS for example fully embrace some new thing, that might do it - but I don't see what the candidate is.

erik_seaberg 7y ago
Kotlin for JVM has a lot of potential. It takes a lot of the pointless busywork out of Java (this is Go's problem), yet the median hiring candidate can probably handle it (this is Scala's problem) and you don't sacrifice decades of library coverage.
- sonnyblarney 7y ago
  Kotlin is nice, but to me it's mostly just 'different', not necessarily an 'advantage'. Without Android adoption (and G did this specifically because of Oracle issues) I don't think anyone would really be using it. Outside of Android, it's not a big thing. I've gone Java to Kotlin and back again simply because the few advantages to Kotlin just aren't worth the phase shift. FYI almost every single code example in Android has Kotlin and Java the same length. It's not really any shorter or more concise in the end. I wish Kotlin well, and it's a great example of how the JVM can be leveraged. The JVM is probably Java's greatest foundational asset, which is why Graal has such potential, if Oracle doesn't screw it up ...

pawelmurias 7y ago

> even Javascript and Python are chipping away at Java's market share. The GraalVM team is working to run a bunch of stuff all together on the JVM