there have been a handful of infrastructure projects in java: kafka and cassandra come to mind immediately, but there are certainly others. i think what has al

there have been a handful of infrastructure projects in java: kafka and cassandra come to mind immediately, but there are certainly others. i think what has always sort of steered me away has been a few things: 1) i've long been interested in snappy, interactive and realtime local and server things. and the jvm can do this stuff, but usually it's better suited for server side use where it can be warmed up appropriately. this may also just be a personal dogma that i need to get over. 2) every language and runtime has its quirks where you have to breakdown the illusions of the language itself and understand the internals to get the best performance, but i feel like java is the worst instance of this, where the tricks that people go through in order to control the gc seem excessive. 3) i like simple and concise programs where i feel like the java ecosystem encourages code sprawl. hello world has so much weird stuff and a serious java project has thousands of small source files where computer aided programming (ie. a proper java ide) is not really optional. i find this not only to be unergonomic, but also challenging for being able to quickly understand what a foreign codebase is doing in a short timeframe. maybe it's different from the perspective of a primary developer on one of these large projects though (and possibly quite pleasant). 4) for some reason, i've always liked feeling closer to the metal. even scripting languages "feel" closer because of the jvm abstraction. this is probably also a personal dogma. > He commented that multi-threaded Java these days far outperforms C, due to the memory management and a garbage collector. people who like java say these sorts of things all the time. i haven't seen a head to head comparison that confirms it though. (although i have not looked). regardless my understanding is that once a jvm is warmed up, it can be quite performant-- and that it has opportunities for live optimization that you don't get in a classic c/c++ runtime. i don't think c/c++ will be going away as long as operating systems are still written in c. a java operating system seems... strange to me. but that said, i think java has proven itself in terms of high performance application server software.