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What dialects of Java are there? Not versions, dialects. (There was a court case to prevent Java from fragmenting, but I guess people around here are too young

• hnlmorg 3y ago
  > What dialects of Java are there? Not versions, dialects. Maybe things have improved since I last did a lot of Java development but there were a few different JVMs out there and compatibility between JDKs /JREs wasn’t 100%. > (There was a court case to prevent Java from fragmenting, but I guess people around here are too young to remember.) I don’t know if this is a dig at me but I remember that era well. At the time I was writing Middleware for Oracle (a low point in my career it has to be said) and I had no end of troubles with differences between Sun and Microsoft JVMs. But it’s worth mentioning Suns court case was about more than just fragmentation. Microsoft were ostensibly trying a hostile takeover of the ecosystem. There has always been a few different implications because Java was historically proprietary software. Which comes right back to my earlier point. > Also, Go and PHP don't have dialects, either. I didn’t say they did. I said they have reference implementations. Though it is worth noting that they arguably do have dialects. There’s an embedded language based on a subset of Go, and there are few PHP implementations not managed by Zend, such as Facebook’s Hiphop (I think it’s called). > Not having an ISO standard is irrelevant as long as the actual language is unified. That’s just less precise way of saying “reference implementation” ;)