Slashdot Mirror
The Coming War Over the Future of Java
snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister writes about what could be the end of the Java Community Process as we know it. With the Apache Software Foundation declaring war on Oracle over Java, the next likely step would be a vote of no confidence in the JCP, which, if the ASF can convince enough members to follow suit, 'could effectively unravel the Java community as a whole,' McAllister writes, with educators, academics, and researchers having little incentive to remain loyal to an Oracle-controlled platform. 'Independent developers could face the toughest decisions of all. Even if the JCP dissolves, many developers will be left with few alternatives,' with .Net offering little advantage, and Perl, Python, and Ruby unable to match Java's performance. The dark horse? Google Go — a language Google might just fast-track in light of its patent suit with Oracle over Android."
Reader Revorm adds related news that Oracle and Apple have announced the OpenJDK project for OS X.
They are the one and only company that can pull this thing straight. They have the money, they have proven their commitment to OSS, so I sincerely hope they step in and fix this. It's too important to let Oracle mess everything up.
You know, this is very puzzling. Why hasn't FOSS come up its own managed runtime+language stack?
It's certainly not for a lack of engineering talent.
Procrastination? Lack of vision? Or is open source just too tribal and fragmented to coordinate on something so big and cross-disciplinary?
With Microsofts history over the past 20 years, I'd say they won't pull any strange tricks until enough people have adapted it and are locked in, then they will suddenly have a change of heart. It's only Microsofts kind heart that keeps C# and Mono open enough, not *anything* legally binding.
Google is trying to force the legal issue and end this with a court battle.
Apache is trying to end it using the JCP
IBM is trying to be all chummy and get Oracle to support OpenJDK
If Google wins then Java is Free, if Apache wins then Java is Free, if IBM wins then Java is theirs.
I wish that C# had the same Linux kernel support as Java does.
It does. None.
So, as the actual problem with java is the corporation that "owns" it decided to misbehave, you propose to switch to another language, from another corporation, for which misbehavig is their way of life?
Understanding that the entire toolchain and widespread adoption is the most important part of getting it. We all (at least, if we were there for it) know how Java happened - the short version is that Sun positioned it as an alternative to the MS Borganism that many companies were rightly afraid of back then.
I still think Java pretty much sucks. But it has the tools, and perhaps more importantly, a huge number of able bodied code monkeys who can write it.
Enter Oracle. The entire strategy that they've pursued forever is not much different than what Microsoft tried - build or buy essential parts of the stack, and then march up and down it to dominate your category, then extract as much rent as possible. It works better in the enterprise space and is bloodier because there are fewer players. (Microsoft's ecology was too varied with too many players to really dominate like Oracle can.)
So, Oracle's strategy is obvious. They own Java, and thus indirectly can manipulate the terms of output of thousands of developers. They don't care about people liking them, and inertia means they can extract rent for a long time (Even if a second Sun/Java moment happened - say, Parrot v. Java, ramp-up for Parrot to fill the niches, get solid, debugged libraries for everything, get widely deployed, and get thousands of developers up to speed takes how long?)
They don't give a shit about Apache, or developer goodwill. The for-profit players like IBM have different strategies, but keep in mind that their goals are profit maximization, too.
So there are some potentially interesting strategic plays to be made between the various players, but anyone with a bit of experience with the business side of the industry has seen this show before.
I forget what 8 was for.
I'm sick of reading slashdot stories and comments that compare dissimilar languages with Java. What makes Java interesting, useful, and modern is the JVM; these comparisons between language features alone are ridiculous. Most of the languages suggested as alternatives in Java-related posts in the last month are merely interpreted. Python, ruby, perl, etc. are all modernish, high-level languages with dynamic typing. They all run (primarily) on their slow, crippled interpreters. This has numerous drawbacks including problematic multithreading (c.f. the arguments about python's GIL and workarounds over the years), if it's even attempted (in perl, separate processes are the only reliable way to do concurrent programming).
And now Slashdot compares Go to Java. Go is certainly interesting, but it's not in the same space as Java. Java is a portable, networked, object-oriented *application* language. It removes a lot of hassles not necessary to tinker with when writing applications. It has useful, established APIs (servlets, EJBs) for building large-scale enterprise applications. Go compiles to machine code and is therefore not portable. Go doesn't allow inheritance. Go is a language that tries to solve a different problem than Java has solved. Go is no replacement.
Java is by no means the end of all languages and runtimes, but it has set the bar pretty high. It would be wonderful for other projects to adopt Java's features and improve and extend them. It'd be awesome if such an efforts weren't completely nullified by having Microsoft as its boss.
For the naive (and the dude who argues that python is a suitable replacement for Java), below is a list of features Java provides:
Java's JVM does true multithreading. The memory model is tight, efficient, and predictable. The language includes useful mechanisms for writing for concurrency (everything from traditional locking mechanisms to concurrent data structures and the convenient "synchronized" keyword). Productive, predictable concurrency is possible in Java and not in many other languages.
The JVM offers other benefits, including security. The class verifier can sort out malicious code before it's executed. The class loader can check roles granted to a piece of code and a cryptographic signature and decide not to run code on that basis. Even if a piece of code gets loaded and executed, it's sandboxed. Talking about these features is usually relegated to discussions about java applets, but their relevance to other applications is noteworthy.
Java includes a lot of well-organized, stable libraries for doing everything from handling HTTP requests and crafting responses to doing cryptography. Its collections API has many data structures that just aren't present in other languages without looking to a third party.
Finally, the JVM makes naive code fast. One can write reasonably expressive, straightforward code and expect that the hotspot compiler will optimize it. It's a boon for getting maintainable, quality code out-the-door quickly.
I too am bothered by Oracle's litigiousness, but running away from Java isn't a solution. We need alternatives, that's for sure, but the availability of such is a lot more limited than the average slashdotter seems to think.
The word is not destroy but kill.
http://www.justice.gov/atr/cases/f1700/1762.htm#N_57_
"Naturally, we would never do it, but it would give us some idea of how much time we have to work with in killing Sun's Java."
Sneak teach kids Algebra using a game
I'm a big Objective-C fan, but running against you are the fact that most of the modern features that give it some parity with Java -- like the GC and the functional programming features -- are only supported by one extremely mercurial vendor that has a nasty tendency of making no 5-year roadmaps. Also the framework and libraries just don't offer the same coverage as Java. A lot of people at the turn of the century bet on WebObjects, which was a serious platform at that time, and now it's abandonware. Nobody wants to get burned like that again.
What was I saying about abandonware?
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
C++ has an astonishingly complicated grammar, which means that compilation takes forever and other tools don't work as well as they do for languages with simpler grammars, like C or Java.
C++ doesn't really have compile-time encapsulation: if you add a private member to a class, you need to recompile everything that uses that class even though the class's public interface didn't change. That woudn't be so bad in and of itself except that C++, again, takes forever to compile.
C++ also doesn't have run-time encapsulation or really any serious run-time error checking that you don't do yourself. Yes, it's for performance reasons, but some people are working on problems that aren't performance-critical and would prefer a language that doesn't pound nails through our dicks. (if it doesn't have encapsulation, why do they call it "object oriented?")
C++'s exception support is hilariously broken. 1) If you've allocated some memory for an object, and then you throw an exception, you don't have that pointer anymore, and because C++ doesn't have garbage collection you've just leaked memory. The only way around this is to implement garbage collection yourself; C++ weenies call this "RAII" and if they're really far down the rabbit hole they sometimes don't even realize that it's just them implementing shitty reference-counting garbage collection. 2) You can't throw exceptions in destructors. Well, you can, but when an exception is raised, all the destructor for objects on the stack are called, and if one of them throws an exception while you're already handling an exception the program terminates. Seriously, that's what the standard says, I'm not making this up. So you can't throw exceptions in destructors, or call any function that might throw an exception. 3) In every major compiler I've used, exception handling support is implemented in such a way that it slows down every function call you make. Yes, it's only slightly, but it means if you really care about performance, you can't use exceptions, and if you don't care about performance why the hell are you using C++? And even if you want to use them they're almost worthless; I mean you can't even get a goddamn stack trace out of them. You can throw arbitrary objects, but the catcher can't figure out what the hell the object is because of C++'s lack of reflection. Etc.
C++, in an effort to be sort-of compatible with C (except where it's not compatible with C, which makes you wonder why they bothered in the first place) keeps all of C's features while creating duplicate features with their own new, horrifying problems. So you have C++ templates, but you still need to deal with C macros. You have std::vectors, but you still need to deal with arrays. You have std::string and char*, and neither is particularly good. Making things even funnier, C++ doesn't like to use its new features and prefers the C stuff: a string literal is a char*, not a std::string, the arguments to main() are int argc, char** argv, rather than something sensible like std::vector args, iostream does not take std::string for its filename arguments, etc.
While we're on the subject, the standard iostream is pants-on-head retarded. The streams are stateful, which means that std::cout foo; depends not only on the values of cout, foo, and the overloaded left bit shift operator, but also on whatever's been sent to cout in the past. You send values like std::hex or std::setw(int) to set parameters, so when you grab a stream you don't really know what the fuck will happen. This is supposed to be an improvement over printf? They're verbose as hell, too: say you're printing some hex numbers. In C, you'd use "printf("0x%08xn", x);" for int x. In C++, you use "std::cout std::hex std::setfill('0') std::setw(8) x std::dec std::endl;" It's absurd.
The standard library is completely anemic. I'm not even talking about GUI stuff, here: there's no platform-independent way to do some really basic stuff like pausing for a length of time, or starting a new thread. You can use so
I've upped my standards, so up yours.