Yet another Hacker News

43 points ejboy 3 hours ago 18 comments

amelius 1 hour ago | parent

I'm not a Java person, but I'm curious how fast it is nowadays, and also the startup time. Can it be used to write shell commands with, for example?

jiggawatts 1 hour ago | parent

Every time I try, I keep going back to .NET, which has been optimising for faster startup time.

Almost all Java benchmarks are for the "steady state" after half an hour of warm up time.

kg 1 hour ago | parent

Doesn't Java have an AOT solution too? Is it not ready for prime time?

miroljub 58 minutes ago | parent

It is, but people like to bash Java ;)

ww520 1 hour ago | parent

I'm using JDK 21 (old) and the startup time is sub-second for small programs.

Havoc 46 minutes ago | parent

That’s not the flex you seem to think

ww520 44 minutes ago | parent

It wasn't meant to be a flex.

__natty__ 56 minutes ago | parent

Very fast. And yes, it can be used for small apps too. With java problem now is not the performance but how verbose still it is. However, it's much better since Java 17 and each release make it even more compact and direct. Like in this release we got much better built-in support for JSON.

binary132 41 minutes ago | parent

JIT + hotspot optimization makes JVM pretty fast, but warmup time is usually the problem. However it does look like they’re addressing startup time with improvements in this release:

- AOT compilation: https://openjdk.org/jeps/544 - ~100ms startup for ZGC: https://openjdk.org/jeps/545

azatom 39 minutes ago | parent

Sorry if it is trivial but bc you asked shell command and if meant the "java script.java" no compile way: even that is fast, but if you run in a shell script loop thousand times, then do not forget to compile.

MrBuddyCasino 1 hour ago | parent

JEP 540: Simple JSON API

  > trailing commas and comments are not supported

Be strict in what you produce, be lenient in what you accept. Grr.

mpyne 20 minutes ago | parent

From the JEP's goals: "Provide only those data types and operations required for strict conformance to RFC 8259, in order to facilitate machine-to-machine communication."

In that case they made the right choice, as machines won't be inserting trailing commas or comments in the first place, and the risk of having consuming apps inadvertently accept invalid data would be high otherwise.

chowells 19 minutes ago | parent

Fortunately, we now have 50 years of evidence of the negative effects of this philosophy on the ecosystem. Being strict in both results in net positive effects for the entire ecosystem. Trying to be lenient in what you accept results in HTML5, where the exact parse tree for every possible input sequence is specified in order to enforce compatibility. It's no longer lenient, because that doesn't work.

jmarlow47 38 minutes ago | parent

It's really refreshing to see the pace of Java development pick up so much over the past few years.

The last few years of server-side has been on Kotlin for me, however, modern Java is looking more and more like anything I'd need in a language.

brianwawok 25 minutes ago | parent

Yah but why? The things it was good at doesn’t really matter nearly as much post AI.

pron 19 minutes ago | parent

Quite the opposite. Java is almost all about an optimising runtime with deep telemetry, and it helps with exactly the things AI needs the most help: https://youtu.be/fXBGBovpH88

jjav 14 minutes ago | parent

> Yah but why? The things it was good at doesn’t really matter nearly as much post AI.

Pretty much the opposite. Those who disliked it usually cited having to type too much due to class verbosity and variable verbosity (the former has merit, the latter was purely a choice).

If you no longer need to type in any of the code, what better than a language with a blazing fast and scalable runtime, with excellent debugging and monitoring support.

MBCook 10 minutes ago | parent

I’m so glad they made that change. So much better than the old days.

I love Java and I’m so glad it’s kept improving so much despite all the turmoil in its ownership.