Java Needs to "Seize the Cloud" in the Next Year | Hacker News Reader

Java Needs to "Seize the Cloud" in the Next Year

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5 pointsmsredmond12 comments

Wasn't Java supposed to "Seize the Cloud" in 2001?

More to the point, hasn't it already for one of the 2/3 competing definitions of cloud? Hadoop, Cassandra, Hbase? How much grid software (as in grid computing, not IaaS or SaaS) isn't Java? Mongo, maybe? The C++ stuff inside Google?

Java needs to die.

That said, Google App Engine has been offering Java for a long time.

"Java needs to die."

Citation needed? Say you need to write fast, concurrent server-side code. What language do you choose, if not Java? Go or Erlang? C++?

Python, or JavaScript perhaps? Not sure, but I would evaluate all other options before falling back to Java.

Clojure or Scala might be acceptable (Java VM).

If you've ever tried to write such a thing in Python or Javascript (node.js anyway) you will eventually come running back to the JVM. Java is not perfect but the JVM is close to it.

EVE Online handles a retarded amount of concurrent users using Stackless Python. There was a story on HN recently about it.

Lol at Python or Javascript being your answers to "fast and concurrent".

Does Javascript even have concurrency constructs?

Jython and JRuby don't suffer from the GIL and GVL respectively from their reference implementations. You can go thread crazy with JVM-based implementations.

Yeah, but Jython's still on Python 2.2 compatibility (I believe) and both of them perform pretty poorly due to Java 7 and invokedynamic being several years late.

Do you have a more concrete example of what you are trying to do?

Service programming, as in not-web-programming.

Solr, for a random example, would not be a good task for either Python or Javascript, there are tricky concurrency concerns involving your index reads/writes and they're both just-plain-not-fast-enough. The only dynamic language I know of that isn't just embarrassingly slow compared to Java is Lua, due to some extreme fanciness on the part of their VM.

Last I heard JavaScript was the fastest dynamic language, don't remember but might be only factor 2 compared to Java.

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