Comment by pie_flavor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pie_flavor | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Java failed because

- it depended on an installation outside the browser, poorly versioned

- and a plugin too, which was extra noise for the user, and not nearly so pain-free as Flash's was

- it was not, under any circumstances, performant (this was before HotSpot)

- AWT was truly, thoroughly, god awful (this was before Swing)

Finally, it was caught between two realms. Clunkier than JS and more difficult to work with than Flash, it tried to do both and ended up doing neither.

So, why should WASM succeed where Java failed? Well, for pretty much every actual reason Java failed. There's really no places to compare them. WASM is implemented in-browser (and the runtime is very small), it's got a ~1.5x slowdown compared to the 2.5x-3x of the big clunkers like Java and C#, and most importantly it knows its place: low level computation. It does not try to do GUI, but leaves that up to the environment; it does not try to do a high level object model, but leaves that up to the language being compiled for it. What reason do you see that Java failed that's also applicable to WASM?

In the 1990s I was building, among other things, web-based controls (in Java) for backend systems. People were completely blown away with what could be done. (The major competing technology was HTML forms and HTTP PUT with Perl CGI.) With the exact same language I was also able to build a high-performance peer-to-peer file sharing system for backend systems. (2+GB files to personal workstations across a large geographic area through ATM -- practically in real time compared to the NFS alternatives.) There was every reason to believe that Java's portability and just-in-time technologies would dominate the computing landscape. I think we can look to Sun Microsystems (and now Oracle) for reasons why Java was eclipsed[0] by other technologies. I have no idea what kind of longevity WASM will have, but I have seen so many technologies come and go over the decades, I know technical excellence is not the primary predictor of what stays or goes.

[0] Yes, there is a pun buried in there.

A big difference: As a user I could "feel" whenever a Java Applet was loaded. Suddenly everything became slow and only rarely the GUIs were acceptable. That diminished reputation in users, aside from security problems etc.

With WASM the user doesn't notice it. Without looking at dev tools you can't tell if some of the functionality is coming from wasm or JavaScript/typescript/..

In consequence users won't develop the "yikes, Java" reaction.

wasm got the chance to slowly creep into stacks.

I always feel these comparisons do not make much sense - it’s like comparing some pre-industrial thing with its today’s equivalent: browsers were simply absolutely not what they are now.

Like, 2 of your points were simply politics, where js just happened to get chosen, while performance got rapidly faster in the coming years. If anything, Java was well ahead of its time and the surrounding environment was not yet ready.

>- it was not, under any circumstances, performant

It was performant enough for one of the most popular games of all time, Minecraft, which was originally a game in a Java applet.

Minecraft was started in 2009. Applets were one of Java's flagship features, i.e. released well before the VM became in a performant enough state.

Incidentally, Minecraft Java has always had horrible performance, to the point where it was rewritten in C++.

There are two versions of Minecraft now.

The main reason Minecraft Java is still alive is the hackability and the resulting extensive mod ecosystem.

It was rewritten in C++, because Playstation, XBox, iOS, Android[0] don't do Java and Microsoft wanted a single codebase.

[0] - Android Java isn't really the same Java as in Minecraft.

Write once, run anywhere ;)

As mentioned, that happened much later, so it is irrelevant.

But for the others, java is insanely fast today, with pretty much the state of the art GC it has. In practice, a really significant chunk of all important server backends run on the JVM.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com