Slashdot Mirror
Java To Overtake C/C++ in 2002
jarek writes "ZDNET has an article that talks about latest research data.
It talks about how Java is overtaking C/C++ next year. The article also talks about developers adopting linux and putting linux to use in mission critical tasks." It's evidently taking developers from the C/C++, but also the Visual Basic camps, with strong growth overseas.
The word overtake is questionable here. Do we mean that more developers will be using it (that's what they mean), or that all that the tasks that those languages have previously been put to will be done in Java?
I think we can make a pretty good case that right around the same time, three toolkits came into existance, the Java widget set (SWING, I believe), Gtk+ and Qt. I notice that 99% of the apps on my Windows desktop are the old C++-based MFC widgets, and my Linux desktop is split between Qt and Gtk+. I never see a Java app unless it's the back-end technology for a Web site (but, more often that's PHP, Perl, Python or VB).
So, from whence comes this figure?
Well, most of it is based on the growth of Java as a wizzy buzz-language in the dot-com startup arena 1-2 years ago. Some of it is based on the fact that in the financial market, in-house apps are very often written in Java because it's something they can hire hordes of programmers to write, and it keeps them happy because their skill-sets are current. Remember, these are the folks that bought WAY into COBOL....
Java's a cool language, and I actually think it puts C++ to shame in terms of the cleanliness of its OO system, but it's just not useable for most of the large-scale development out there (can you imagine how much slower Mozilla or GCC would be if they were written in Java?)
C will continue to be the right language to choose, but C++ will continue to be chosen a large percentage of the time because people only think about the performance of critical sections not the maintainability or cleanliness of development.
Troll? No, just firm opinions that I have formed over the last 10 years watching first C++ and then Java become the darling languages of the "if it's OO it's good" programming set (not that the converse is true either....)
Looks like /. can predict the future. A few weeks ago in
this article
the /. community discussed java as a good CS Introductory language and the
post went on with a lot of people talking about java taking over as a main
language. Just shows that if you want to know what the IT world has going
on, look at what the IT people have to say.
"If ignorance is bliss, why aren't there more happy people in the world?"
Ok, so 77.2 + 21.8 + 21.4 + 20.4 = 140.8% ? I guess in the survey folks could respond with more than one choice for their distro, but I'm still surprised that there are *that* many people out there using more than one for their Web servers.
Java is fun and all, and usefull in web aps, but face it, you cant write an FPS in java, and you cant really write a java kernel. The language is useful in certain things, but if you need performance, you have to go more low level, like C/C++ or assembly.
Welcome to my land of make believe.
You mean something like this?
It's a port to Java of the Quake engine which was never completed because of pressure put on the developers by ID Software. When I first saw it a couple of years ago, I was quite impressed!
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
Thanks for the vote of java Support.
:)
It's called JAMID and was shown, to a much impressed crowd, at Quakecon last week.
(Quakecon is the ID sponsired yearly gathering and tournament of 1300 of the msot rabid Quake fans in the world.)
Obviously you missed it.
There's ben some recent discussion abotu it, with quotes from attendees to Quakecon and some ncie comments from Quakecon's organizer-- Evil John, over at Javagaming.org.
Its nice to know that we're a 'real language' now
if you wanna talk speed...
*flashback*
Programmer 1: "Who would ever use C for applications/system design, I mean it's so much slower and bulkier than assembler."
Programmer 2: "Well it is more portable..."
Programmer 1: "To hell with your portability."
*Today*
Programmer 1: "Who would ever use Java for applications/system design, I mean it's so much slower and bulkier than assembler."
Programmer 2: "Well it is more portable..."
Programmer 1: "To hell with your portability."
Remove *your pants* to send me email.
Amen to that.
When learning Java 3 yrs ago, one thing attracted me imeediatly was the availability of data structures. (Vector / Hashmaps / RedBlackTree / Sets...). Before that when doing my C/C++ I already had a home brew Vector/Hashmap stuff which I used. The fact it is already in the lanaguage distribution and well tested was a huge win.
- HOw many times you have pulled your hair in debugging a double linked list (don't tell me you haven't, every C programmer goes through this religiously)
- you would have atleast try to implement a String class once in your lifetime for C++ (a very good learning experience!, and very good way to get confused about = operators and overloaded functions)
At that time, STL wasn't even available to me (gcc / Irix) nor it was encouraged by university for projects. b/c what compiles on your IRiX machine might not compile on the solaris build machine & vice versa.
I thought this is where C++ lagged, an industry standard language coming out with no 'utils' available. Sure I know there are StingRay & tools++. But still nothing beats the feeling of these being readily available.
Right now I am using a Cayenne libs for Hashtable in C++ and having 'fun' getting it to compile on Solaris. SOme of their header files are 'plain stupid' and won't compile with sun CC 5.0.
So far if I want to develop an opensource gui application for Win & Linux, my only choice was Java. b/c I can give them a JAR file and it would just work. Now that QT made available free for windows for opensource programs I'd look at it again.
THis is not a C++/Java flame. I am merely saying that Java language designers did it right & learnt from C++ and academia.
LinuxLover
"C... i think I love you... but I want to know for sure...
:)
come here and hold me tight... oh you move me..."
Showing my age, but its so ncie to see someone blindly in love
For the record and FYI, the defintion of Java is controlled by the JCP, an open standards organization that anyone can join.
I don't see number of developers as being all that meaningful a measurement. I'd guess that the vast bulk of Java development is for relatively small applets and servelets, and since that sort of programming is considerably easier than serious application and OS development, the bar for being a Java developer is lower than for being a C/C++ developer. Developer hours, though harder to measure, would probably provide a more meaningful representation of how "big" a language has become.
That being said, unlike a lot of posters here, I don't see speed as being a permanent impediment to Java's growth. We're already at the point where some serious Java apps are fast enough for everyday use, and I expect that to be more true over time as a) hardware continues to get faster and b) OS support for Java gets faster and more integrated. Mac OS X does a truly beautiful job of integrating Java support into the OS (ironically, better than anything from Sun itself) and some Linux solutions aren't far behind.
And it's nice to hear that it's taking market share from VB. Java may never live up to Sun's early visions of taking over the desktop, but if it helps slow down or even stop the progression of VB/C#/.NET (and yes, I know these are three different things, but they're all clearly connected as elements of Kaiser Bill's Evil Plan) then that's a good thing.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
The bytecode idea is a really good one, especially with the large (although shrinking) number of platforms you have to support these days, and the possible rise of VLIW processors on the horizon. I don't really like coding in Java all that much, though. Is anyone working on a compiler for another language that compiles to bytecode that will run on a JVM (rather than a internet-c or c# vm)?
Narrative
Yes, you missed the point. First, the VM based versions of Java (using adaptive compilation as opposed to simple interpretation) are now very competitive with C++ speedwise. Sometimes slower, sometimes faster with usually a fairly small delta.
C is generally more efficient, but you lose object orientation.
Finally, there are traditional ahead-of-time compilers for Java like gcj (which shipped with gcc 3.0).
Java is well suited to a large percentage of programming tasks. For those areas where its not appropriate it can (fairly;) easily call C/C++.
Java is open, productive, fast, cross-platform, widely taught, supported by every significant software company, and somewhat future-proof. What other language/platform comes close?
The real proof will be forthcoming - when many anti-Java Luddites are in the unemployment lines, still complaining about it... ;-)
186,282 mi/s...not just a good idea, its the law!
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
Hardware designed to run Java seems to run it fine and with a huge amount of speed increase over normal pc hardware.. By that line of thought, all that needs to happen is for SUN to get with the hardware mfgs, spread around a little bonus money , and get them to better support java apps. Java's a little complicated to program in, I'll admit I tried it, didn't like it, but I'm a little cpp biased.
Are YOU listed?
Seriously, folks. Does one avoid taking this kind of study with a grain of salt simply because it supports a Slashdot Approved Technology?
If this had been a study sponsored by Microsoft presented at a Microsoft conference supporting Microsoft technologies, people would be gathering up the pitchforks and flaming torches.
Feel free to mod this down to the pits of Hell, but we both know it's true.
No they aren't.
The last time I used CGI (which was many years ago), each CGI request required a new heavyweight process to be spawned. I don't think this has changed, but I could be wrong.
Servlets don't work that way. They are part of the same heavyweight process, and you don't need to keep re-instantiating them anyway. Session state is kept per connection, but you can have far fewer than N threads to manage N users.
A CGI written in C is almost certainly vastly slower than simiar code writen as a Java servlet. Deal with it.
-jon -jon
Remember Amalek.
An FPS in java is not a dumb idea at all; most of the performance in framerate is determined by the graphics drivers, and it wouldn't surprise me if the guts of that isn't assembly anyway- the game logic may have little to do with the frame rate.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"60% use Java. 40% use Java. yada yada. What's the breakdown of what those developers are doing with it. I'm not disagreeing, It just could make a big difference. I mean a certain, not insignificant, portion of developers I meet follow every fad that comes along. C# is evil, but it'll mean an easy switch if the internet gets taken over by MS. Just a thought. Besides that, who here likes this whole concept of corporations controlling languages. Sun 'owns' Java, MS 'owns' C#. Who owns c++? C++ may be screwed up, but at least it won't be screwed up purely for marketing hype, profit and politics.
OK I've read a dozen or so posts dissing Java because it's "Stupid" or "Slow" or "None of the apps I run are written in Java" or whatever -- which forces me to say this: Programmers who write in Java are writing code for distributed enterprise applications. They're professional computer programmers, not ether breathing geeks such as ourselves. I say it's waaaay past time that we all collectively pull our heads out of our asses and realize that the world doesn't revolve around Linux/Perl/GCC and Kernel patches!! There's a whole world of programmers out there (who DON'T generally post to this forum because they're too busy getting work done) who don't live and breath everything Linux day in and day out. They work for a living.
End of Rant.
Unfortuantely I see Java being used more and more as a teaching language in universities, ergo more and more developers graduating out of schools are learning Java. Very few college programs will teach anything like C or C++ when they can teach object oriented programming using Java. These developers then move into the private sector and recommend developing using Java to their superiors. It's a vicious cycle. this is also the natural progression for those who are "saved" by Object Oriented methodologies.