Java 8 vs. Java 9

https://www.romexsoft.com/blog/java-8-vs-java-9/

by nataliiabubniuk • 9 years ago

58 87 9 years ago

romexsoft.com

stevehiehn3• 9 years ago

Nice summary. I'm pretty sure there is a new default GC as well.

_lbaq• 9 years ago

No new GC but Java 9 makes the G1 collector the default GC

stevehiehn3• 9 years ago

Ah, thanks for the clarification!

melling2• 9 years ago

"Modular code"

I thought Jigsaw was rejected.

stevehiehn3• 9 years ago

I think it just keep causing delays due to complexity.

melling2• 9 years ago

It was started 10 years ago.

pjmlp9• 9 years ago

No, what what rejected was the lack of certain features due to OSGi political discussion.

However they have been talking how to solve this and the new release is planned for end September.

jdmichal• 9 years ago

AFAIK, the core JVM will still be modular. The disagreements were around how to expand that modularity out of just the JVM "kernel" and into user space.

I'm not entirely sure what that actually buys, when classes are loaded only on demand anyway...

ahoka• 9 years ago

Rejected by Oracle's competitors. I'm pretty sure that Oracle will do what it does the best and be a dick and release it anyway. IMHO, that would be the right choice.

jankotek• 9 years ago

It does not mention internals, changes in Unsafe or concurrency are pretty big deal

mapcars• 9 years ago

WoW, it's 2017 and Java finally gets a REPL and it's only 30 years behind the market. Congratulations!

supremesaboteur• 9 years ago

The rest of the world is behind Java in some developments like container-style isolation of different applications in the same runtime environment. However people still mock Java in things the community is behind. Wait till the cool kids discover conatiner managed transactions. Then it will THE GREATEST THING EVAH !!

sixbrx• 9 years ago

.Net has done such a thing with Application Domains since its very early days on Windows. Recently they've decided it's not worth the trouble to move over to .Net Core.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/framework/app-domain...

pawadu5• 9 years ago

Could you explain when one would need Java REPL?

Also, are you familiar with Groovy and Scala and their intended uses?

TeMPOraL6• 9 years ago

Could you explain when one would need Java REPL?

Like, all the time?

REPL becomes an integral part of the programming process if your language has one.

pjmlp9• 9 years ago

Java already had REPLs in the form of Beanshell, Groovy and Eclipse scratchpad.

It's 2017, where are the REPLs for Go and Rust?

kasey_junk2• 9 years ago

I used a REPL in Java right around when they did the name change to J2SE, so that must have been 20 years ago? By the OPs definition it was still 10 years too late though so there is that.

jitl2• 9 years ago

Although there's no REPL provided with Go, I've found that gore (https://github.com/motemen/gore) works pretty well. It feels similar to the old Java REPLs you'd find hidden in Intellij or other Java IDEs -- sometimes you can see the seams in its facade.

PrimHelios• 9 years ago

It's 2017, where are the REPLs for Go and Rust?

Nobody's gonna make a REPL for languages nobody uses :^)

oblio• 9 years ago

The original Java REPL was called Eclipse

TeMPOraL6• 9 years ago

Nitpick, but God, I hate this hero image. It's "fantasy UI" is so lazily done it hurts the eyes. It's just the same block copy-pasted around and resized multiple times. Did whoever made this picture think nobody would notice?

(Yes, I hate half-assed design.)

jakub_g• 9 years ago

Also they use contrast ratio of 3.0 for main text (gray font on white background). WCAG minimum is 4.5 and recommended is 7.0.

cabaalis• 9 years ago

But triangle buttons! Unlabeled ones, at that. The guy in the picture is thinking, "I wonder what this one does..."

pawadu5• 9 years ago

I love Java. I think it has changed the world for the better.

That being said, I just can't get excited about new language features now that I have discovered Kotlin. It is essentially Java but with a much smarter compiler and a more modern and sane syntax.

lmm2• 9 years ago

Similarly, I can't get excited about Kotlin's features because they're all things I've been using for 5 years already in Scala.

koolba• 9 years ago

Does Scala/sbt still take 5 years to compile moderately sized apps?

beachbum8029• 9 years ago

ICE BURN

forinti• 9 years ago

I used to like Java when it was simpler. Generics I thought were great, but the new features just seem like attempts to shoehorn features of dynamic languages onto a business language. And I still can't have multiline strings (on a language used for Web programming!).

_pmf_• 9 years ago

but the new features just seem like attempts to shoehorn features of dynamic languages onto a business language

None of the new features has anything to do with dynamic languages[0]. Streams and lambdas are still statically typed.

[0] Well, there is DynamicInvoke, but this is not a Java feature, but a JVM feature.

jitix2• 9 years ago

The multi line issue pisses me off on a daily basis, esp when writing tests that deal with JSONs. It's so much readable with multi line strings in python and groovy.

I usually use groovy for my fun/toy projects but at my day job writing enterprise code the tests have huge JSON building blocks before the actual assertion happens.

specialist2• 9 years ago

The caretakers of Java strayed. Adopting goofy dynamic and lambda features, trying to attract the cool kids was a mistake.

They should have stuck to their original mission of reducing programming mistakes and boosting productivity.

String processing, a la perl, Python, is something every single developer does every day. We need multilines, intrinsics, first class regexes, etc. every day.

They should have made 'utf8', 'utf16', etc first class scalars, reducing the memory footprint of java.lang.String, and everything reliant on String, ages ago.

They should have increased conciseness, a la Kotlin, Ceylon, Nice, Boo (minus the duck typing), ages ago.

I'm also eager for lightweight objects (value types?), a la Kava, which I think has been pushed back to JDK 10.

Asooka• 9 years ago

Okay, this is completely tangential to the article, but I see this footer on the website:

"We are using cookies to improve your experience of our site. By clicking ‘Agree’ or ignoring the banner, you are assenting to our use of cookies."

I don't really care, but is this strictly speaking legal? "If you don't read this, you agree to it"? If I read it, am I "ignoring the banner"? Usually if you don't agree, they are supposed to not store cookies and ask every time, which is something I'm actually OK with.

Entangled• 9 years ago

Boring.

I'll tell you a little secret, Java is the number one programming language in the world just because it is used by millions of programmers for Android apps and a few enslaved programmers in corporate gulags. Once Kotlin takes the Android world by storm Java will sit next to Cobol in the history books of technology.

pjmlp9• 9 years ago

In what language and runtime will Kotlin run on?

romanovcode2• 9 years ago

Kotlin is a language that runs on JVM6.

alphabetam• 9 years ago

You hugely underestimate how much of large corporations work in java. Android, compared to the enterprise software, is peanuts.

cptskippy3• 9 years ago

Our enterprise used a lot of Oracle (e.g. Java) products but never committed to actual Java development. As of late they have been heavily divesting themselves of Oracle as rapidly as possible.

vonmoltke2• 9 years ago

Java is the number one programming language in the world just because it is used by millions of programmers for Android apps and a few enslaved programmers in corporate gulags

This is an incorrect and terribly biased opinion. I have been working primarily in Java for over five years and neither of those applies to me. Java has been a core language in ML and NLP for at least a decade.

geodel2• 9 years ago

At one point Scala was going to take over the world. It was hot favorite of many fastest growing companies. Then the companies grew and moved to Java with or without much fuss.

Your secret does seem like secret to lot of people. In my knowledge Java is big because lots and lots of companies use Java stack for boring enterprise applications. And in those places people could care less about cool stuff and work on things that pays.

Cobol is still used in very critical software at big Banks. Java along with it quite respectful place. Whereas Kotlin is a little bit of lot of things. Runs of JS/JVM/Native but none of them a unique strength for Kotlin. So it will be very difficult to compete with languages which committed to single platform and have serious business use cases.

cel1ne5• 9 years ago

One of Kotlin's design goals was 100% compatibility with java.

Whenever I work on a java-codebase and see a class that could be expressed much simpler in Kotlin I press "Cmd+Option+Shift+K".

Intellij IDEA automatically converts this file to Kotlin. The codebase continues to work without issues and I can proceed extending this part in Kotlin.

jffry• 9 years ago

Site appears to be down, here's an archive/mirror: https://archive.is/6tger

geodel2• 9 years ago

JEP 110: HTTP/2 Client

* The API and implementation will not be part of Java SE.

* The API will live under the jdk.incubtor namespace.

* The module will not resolve by default at compile or run time.

Modular source code is internal reorganization of JDK. Hopefully it will not affect Java developers negatively.

Process API: It can provide PIDs finally. Seems like big feature for Java 9.

JShell: May find some use. Not sure how many Java developer care about it.

specialist2• 9 years ago

re JShell. nodejs has raised my awareness of the joys of shell scripting. So something like this would be cool:

  #!/usr/bin/env java

For my own projects, I foresee replacing all those goofy build tools with straight Java. Less impedance mismatch.

cel1ne5• 9 years ago

Check out kotlin-script https://github.com/andrewoma/kotlin-script

bballer• 9 years ago

I can't connect to the site... HN hug of death?

nataliiabubniuk• 9 years ago

Works already. Fallen due to huge traffic.

Java 8 vs. Java 9

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