Reasons to be excited about Java in 2013

http://jaxenter.com/5-reasons-to-be-excited-about-java-in-2013-45938.html

by eranation • 14 years ago

70 64 14 years ago

va9• 14 years ago

JVM is definetly going to be exciting just not because of Java but all other JVM languages.

mitchty• 14 years ago

Yep, in a way the jvm is doing the one thing that native platforms haven't. That is provide a universal (in java land at least) interface in java bytecode to languages running within the jvm.

Think about the ffi annoyances with c->c++->other-lang, its so simple in jruby to use clojure libraries, or rhino for some other stuff, or vice-versa, or whatever.

And I'm not a java fanboy, but that fundamental aspect of the jvm as a platform is crazy cool.

bitwize• 14 years ago

The same is true of Mono/.NET as well; in fact the CLR was designed for this and has features the JVM lacks, such as parametric types, invokedynamic, tail calls, etc.

If you're into functional programming the CLR is the runtime to beat.

drivebyacct22• 14 years ago

Is the same true of LLVM?

biesnecker• 14 years ago

Reasons to be excited about Java in 2013: scala, clojure, jruby, groovy, ...

ExpiredLink2• 14 years ago

... which no serious developer will use. Not in 2013, not later.

ZoFreX4• 14 years ago

Absolutely ridiculous comment. You added nothing to the discussion and gave no justification for a frankly ignorant standpoint. I can speak for two of them: JRuby is an absolute godsend even if you aren't massively interested in Ruby - Java libraries/classes + a REPL is a phenomenally powerful combination and makes learning new libraries incredibly easy. Groovy I am not a fan of for significant development, but it's great for DSLs, and in particular gradle is the nicest way I've found to manage dependencies and project setup.

thebluesky7• 14 years ago

I can't speak to the other languages, but Scala is definitely being used pretty heavily in a number of pretty major back-end systems for stock trading, cloud computing, banking and successful startups like Twitter, Foursquare, Tumblr, Quora etc.

rafadc• 14 years ago

Crap! I'm not serious then :(

BadDesign• 14 years ago

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/No_True_Scotsman

thebluesky7• 14 years ago

My thoughts exactly. Scala seems to be the JVM language gaining the most traction at the moment. The JVM is an extremely impressive piece of engineering. Very reliable, great tooling and it's the fastest VM out there for any language.

After 17 years of Java the language many Java devs. have built up skills around the JVM and java class libraries. Many of us are now looking for a more modern language which lets us leverage our existing knowledge. Scala + friends are pretty hard to ignore these days.

felipe• 14 years ago

> Very reliable, great tooling and it's the fastest VM out there for any language.

The JVM also has a very rich open source ecosystem. If your language-of-choice runs on the JVM, very likely you can leverage any Java-based library right out of the box.

joshAg2• 14 years ago

Can someone who knows more explain how java will do gpgpu? Is it going to make the jvm runnable on a gpu, or are they going to do something like compiling jvm byte-code to C/++/assembler code that will handle all the memory management it takes to run code on the gpu?

seanmcdirmid• 14 years ago

They could always do some fancy operating overloading to produce expression trees that are then converted into GPU codelike I did in this C# library I made a while ago (basically, call it a staged embedded DSL):

http://bling.codeplex.com/

The idea works well for functional code (what pixel and vertex shaders basically are) but it doesn't really map well to more imperative GPGPU code.

DaNmarner• 14 years ago

If "JVM languages go from strength to strength" is a reason to get excited about Java in 2013, should I be already excited in 2012?

guard-of-terra7• 14 years ago

Aren't you?

finnw• 14 years ago

Yes, but you will need a time machine

camus2• 14 years ago

About the JVM not the language ...

nnq2• 14 years ago

Question (maybe stupid, not a Java guy nowadays...): will bytecode coming from code using Java 8 features be runable on older VMs? Or, to put it otherwise, are new features like lambdas just syntactic sugar / compiler sugar, or have they significantly changed the bytecode and VM to make them work?

guard-of-terra7• 14 years ago

They add new instructions with each release so the bytecode is not backwards compatible. But it does not matter much because most of jvm code is deployed on the server, and the rest is delivered with bundled jvm.

However, you can have compiler generate lower version bytecode for you. If you have a Java 8 compiler but want Java 1.4 bytecode - no problem, just ask compiler to target 1.4. It will warn you if you use any >1.4 features. Maybe it will even let you use lambdas (maybe not, I'm not sure).

Java is very backwards compatible. That's why it progresses so slowly perhaps.

ZoFreX4• 14 years ago

Bytecode is not made incompatible with every release, actually - for example the generics added in 1.5 use type erasure, and so are a compile-time-only feature, leaving the bytecode still compatible with 1.4 JVMs.

joshAg2• 14 years ago

At a bytecode level, everything including and above assembler is syntactic sugar.

I don't think there's any theoretical reason for the bytecode or the bytecode assembler language to need to change. Just like there's no reason lisp and c can't both be compiled to IA32 bytecode, even though lisp has lambdas and c does not.

Rather the issue is going to be at the compilation stage, where support for anonymous methods will need to be added. From my limited knowledge of compilers two ways it could be done are:

* just give the lambda methods a namespace that is unique from the namespace programmers have access to (eg a variable with a space or a tab in its name). Now lambdas will be handled like regular named methods, but the namespace for them will be invisible to the programmer, and the compiler will be modified to have two method namespaces/an expanded namespace for functions.

* Make all methods lambdas and then bind method variables to the lambda methods similar to how atomic/primitive (eg integer, float, chars) and other non-atomic/reference (objects, arrays) variables are bound to their anonymous objects. This is similar to how anonymous objects are handled. An anonymous object is what's returned by constructors, which are then bound to some variable. In this case the compiler needs to support methods that aren't bound to a variable.

That said, it's entirely possible that making changes to the bytecode and the jvm will allow for faster running code, but those changes wouldn't be required out of some theoretical necessity for supporting lambdas.

nnq2• 14 years ago

Yes, the reasoning makes sense.

I was actually thinking at this from a "language evolvability" p.o.v. : if, hypothetically, a language like Python would be bytecode compiled and the bytecode compatible v2 to v3, you could evolve the language syntax much faster without the worry for complicated "transitions": You could then use python 2 libraries in a python 3 program and so on...

I'm in the initial stages of a (not so serious) language design project - a language "designed for accelerated evolution of both syntax and semantics", and I was considering the hypothesis that a "bytecode" compiled language could evolve much faster than either an interpreted or compiled-to-machine-code one.

wyuenho• 14 years ago

I have a better question: when is the Oracle JVM going to support caching of JIT'ed code profiles from the last run so the JVM can start up faster and doesn't have to warm up? This will make running Eclipse soooo much smoother.

thebluesky7• 14 years ago

The gains for this approach are usually marginal as disk IO is expensive vs generating code in memory using the JIT.

aardvark179• 14 years ago

The lambda implementation requires the MethodHandle/invokeDynamic work introduced at 7, and run time components introduced at 8. There is also some significant work being done on the inliner to support better optimisation for lambdas. Further to that 8 introduces default implementations to interfaces to allow lambda exploiting features to be added to the standard Java APIs while allowing old code to be run without requiring recompilation.

Though changes to the instruction set do not happen at every release there are normally changes to the class file format - so although generics were implemented by type erasure at Java 5 so did not need an instruction set change new signature information was added to the class file format to describe the type parameters, and annotations were introduced which required further class file format changes.

caycep• 14 years ago

how much is all of this tied to Oracle? is openjre and other non-oracle jvms ready for prime time?

buzaga2• 14 years ago

exciting if you're still a Java developer, right?

Java getting lambdas is cool, I'd be excited if I still was a Java Developer... but it's like at least 3 years I'm using lambda functions everywhere else, almost all the other reasons sound like old news too... "Java now is 'cloud'!", really?

bulgroz• 14 years ago

What about the memory wall ? being limited to few gigs because of the GC stop-of-the-world is not very exciting.

Reasons to be excited about Java in 2013

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