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Lucene? Android :) Tomcat? Maven? The Minecraft coding community is amazing. What they get done without documentation is stunning.

fieryscribe 6y ago
AWS too. A large portion of it is written in Java
- victor106 6y ago
  Any references?
manuelabeledo 6y ago
I guess that they wanted to go down the route of "hardly controversial and highly popular" applications, that's why they didn't include Maven. Granted, Maven is an essential piece in the Java ecosystem, yet it seems that many developers are highly opinionated about it.
- Bartweiss 6y ago
  Citing Maven also feels a bit circular. It's an important Java application, but being a build tool it's only because there's lots of Java out there to build. Minecraft and a lot of the other apps are terminally impressive, so it's easier to justify the ecosystem that produced them.
tlarkworthy 6y ago
It's funny how Java is not considered a good language for games... yet Java managed to snag one of the most important games of the decade in the end
- Orphis 6y ago
  It's really not great. Doable, but not great. That's why they moved to a classic C++ codebase instead on other platforms. On a side note, I worked on Jpcsp, a PSP emulator in Java. Great for research and doing refactoring in the code quickly, not great for performance, even with a JIT. We wrote later PPSSPP in C++, performance was there quite easily.
  - jjice 6y ago
    Great work on PPSSPP. I haven't used it in a few years, but even back then the performance was great!
  - iamcreasy 6y ago
    > It's really not great. Could you provide some more information on what it was not great?
    - mumblemumble 6y ago
      For games, probably the worst thing about Java, especially if you're still on Java 8, is the garbage collector. Its pause times can be brutal. This won't be noticeable for games that aren't too hard on memory, or games where framerate doesn't really matter, but it was definitely noticeable (and annoying) in earlier versions of Minecraft. On Java 11 or later, I wouldn't expect it to be nearly such a big deal. At least not relative to some other issues. For example, it being a reflective language means that there's a fair amount of memory overhead that's really only there to support features that aren't so useful in games development. Also, there's a fair bit of overhead, in terms of both CPU and memory churn, to making calls into native libraries from Java. Nowadays, neither of those is a big deal for a large swathe of games, either, so I don't think one can really make a blanket statement that Java is not great for games development.
      - mooman219 6y ago
        The "Java is bad for games" mindset is in part just historical bias. Performance and GC are thrown around as shallow excuses for comparing idiomatic Java with game design C++. Actually applying methods to reduce memory pressure like using arenas, and accepting vectors to mutate instead of creating new ones solve most of the GC penalty you paid for not having to think about it while prototyping. Large servers in java minecraft patch the server to do just that, and they operate well. I think the biggest barrier for Java in Games is the stigma and lack of resources relative to C++.
        6y ago
RMPR 6y ago
>Lucene? It's mentioned in the Wikipedia search section.
suyash 6y ago
Android stole and abused Java :(

fieryscribe 6y ago

AWS too. A large portion of it is written in Java

victor106 6y ago
Any references?

manuelabeledo 6y ago

I guess that they wanted to go down the route of "hardly controversial and highly popular" applications, that's why they didn't include Maven. Granted, Maven is an essential piece in the Java ecosystem, yet it seems that many developers are highly opinionated about it.

Bartweiss 6y ago
Citing Maven also feels a bit circular. It's an important Java application, but being a build tool it's only because there's lots of Java out there to build. Minecraft and a lot of the other apps are terminally impressive, so it's easier to justify the ecosystem that produced them.

tlarkworthy 6y ago

It's funny how Java is not considered a good language for games... yet Java managed to snag one of the most important games of the decade in the end

Orphis 6y ago
It's really not great. Doable, but not great. That's why they moved to a classic C++ codebase instead on other platforms. On a side note, I worked on Jpcsp, a PSP emulator in Java. Great for research and doing refactoring in the code quickly, not great for performance, even with a JIT. We wrote later PPSSPP in C++, performance was there quite easily.
- jjice 6y ago
  Great work on PPSSPP. I haven't used it in a few years, but even back then the performance was great!
- iamcreasy 6y ago
  > It's really not great. Could you provide some more information on what it was not great?
  - mumblemumble 6y ago
    For games, probably the worst thing about Java, especially if you're still on Java 8, is the garbage collector. Its pause times can be brutal. This won't be noticeable for games that aren't too hard on memory, or games where framerate doesn't really matter, but it was definitely noticeable (and annoying) in earlier versions of Minecraft. On Java 11 or later, I wouldn't expect it to be nearly such a big deal. At least not relative to some other issues. For example, it being a reflective language means that there's a fair amount of memory overhead that's really only there to support features that aren't so useful in games development. Also, there's a fair bit of overhead, in terms of both CPU and memory churn, to making calls into native libraries from Java. Nowadays, neither of those is a big deal for a large swathe of games, either, so I don't think one can really make a blanket statement that Java is not great for games development.
    - mooman219 6y ago
      The "Java is bad for games" mindset is in part just historical bias. Performance and GC are thrown around as shallow excuses for comparing idiomatic Java with game design C++. Actually applying methods to reduce memory pressure like using arenas, and accepting vectors to mutate instead of creating new ones solve most of the GC penalty you paid for not having to think about it while prototyping. Large servers in java minecraft patch the server to do just that, and they operate well. I think the biggest barrier for Java in Games is the stigma and lack of resources relative to C++.
      - 6y ago

RMPR 6y ago

>Lucene? It's mentioned in the Wikipedia search section.

suyash 6y ago

Android stole and abused Java :(