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Comment by marcinzm | Hacker News Reader

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marcinzm·

Scripts where startup time matters.

Situations where you don't want the heavy-weight and complex JVM.

Cases where you need to interact with C/C++ code a lot (ML, etc.).

Companies where python is the norm and introducing another language adds a lot of overhead.

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GraalVM (and SubstrateVM) is actually fixing a lot of these; I had a short-lived process that I AOT compiled with SubstrateVM, and I spent a lot of time checking I had done it right and not somehow accidentally compiled in my input data as well or something -- I got a two order of magnitude speedup, with fewer than ten lines of code change.

Replace Java with literally anything else (including whatever Java implementation does not have the issue) and the "startup time" red herring is gone.

Then you get different issues including more obscure and untested systems. I responded to someone asking why not use Java. I answered it. Please don't try to change the question after the fact when you don't like the answer.

I know you're trying to pin me as being rude, but no. Your answer is bad and ad-hoc. Just because a language is not Java does not make it magically untested and obscure. Just use Go tbh.

Edit: Okay I see the original guy stated Java. It is what it is. The real useful answer is to just use any other typed language, and not use Python.

Java's punishing startup times is not a red herring, and I'm dumbfounded someone in a forum like HN makes such a claim. Even in serverless applications like AWS Lambda, python and javascript enjoy execution times that are an order of magnitude faster than Java ones, even with hot starts and stuff initialized a priori.

I was saying that it's a red herring to go "oh people don't used typed languages because Java programs start up slow".

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