3 ms·

Project Leyden – addressing Java’s slow startup time

• PaulHoule 7y ago
  I think it's so ironic that you can tree shake the "dynamic" language Javascript if you use the import system, but that you can't tree shake a Java program because "static" Java programs almost always use reflection, if only to get resource files that the standard library needs.
  • bitcharmer 7y ago
    I've been doing software engineering (predominantly java) for the last 20 years and I don't understand your comment. Could you please explain what you mean by "tree shaking"?
    • PaulHoule 7y ago
      Javascript build chains can look at all the definitions in your project and it's dependencies and can then remove the definitions that never get used. This you can have 1000+ recursive dependencies and still wind up with an only slightly bloated program in the end. The same design feature also means that different dependencies can see different namespaces so it is not such a deadly problem that dependency A and depends cycle B both need different and incompatible versions of library C.