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Comment by kibwen | Hacker News Reader

> Hickling pointed to Java, which has long “seemed to be replacing C++ itself,” but hasn't.

This is inaccurate. Java completely ate C++'s lunch in the enterprise space back around the turn of the millennium. Java doesn't need to continue to eat into C++'s marketshare in other domains, because it has more than enough mindshare to sustain itself (there are more Java programmers than C++ programmers), and its very existence keeps C++ from reasserting itself in the enterprise space.

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Correct me if I'm wrong here, but now that everything is run in a docker container anyway, doesn't most of Java's appeal of "write once, run anywhere" from the turn of the millennium go away? At this point all it has is garbage collection and a network effect.

Java has a number of other advantages... you can effectively develop for Linux on a windows box. The vm architecture makes debugging easier. It has a large and useful body of code, including lots of libraries and features that ease interfacing with legacy systems (like corba and soap)

The time and effort needed to train Java developers versus C++ developers is also huge.

This means more Java developers are available for hire and they typically cost less than C++ developers. This reduced on-boarding time and reduced cost is extremely attractive for enterprises.

I don't think WORA was ever a really big deal for server-side work. In practice, you know what platform you're developing for, and even if you were developing on Windows and deploying on Solaris, you would have plenty of opportunities to test on Solaris before deploying.

I think the reason that Java beat C++ for boring line of business apps is that it was much, much quicker to write code which ran fast enough and didn't crash much. Having nice easy to use URL/HttpURLConnection classes built in was probably also a surprisingly big part of it!

Most of enterprise Java jobs in mid/ junior engineering level are similar to old times production assembly line, everything has a Factory or Impl from dependencies. All you have to do is add bunch of methods and connect API's and service bus (of course I'm extremely simplifying it, but) it's not hard to find people who can do that, also it's not hard to get them up to speed for what needs to be done so the churn rate doesn't impact a lot to enterprises which is a big win. In my personal experience I don't think that's possible with C++ so Java may have started with "write once, run anywhere" now its more of glue between longer running actors and constantly changing workforce

> At this point all it has is garbage collection

You say that like it's a minor thing, but GC is probably the largest language-related productivity improvement I've ever experienced as a developer, second maybe only to static types.

Unless you need bare metal speed, or use some specific piece of code, never use C++. It is horrible, convoluted mess that will consume developer hours into pointless trivia that are not issues in anu other languages. So C++ has that as point against unless you want to waste developer hours on purpose. I’m saying this while writing C++ daily because in our domain (cad, geometric computing) for our use case it’s the best option only because mostly it’s the only option.

Yes and the best part is that companies instead of migrating from Java to something lighter are simply trying new things like GraalVM which makes native executables.

So your developers can keep on writing crappy and heavy spring boot applications (which need 10-15 seconds in best case scenarios to to start) and eventually be "graalvm-ed" to produce a native executable that starts in < 1 sec.

I mean, that's a brilliant evolution (no jokes). This is how you keep in the game without getting devoured by Go and similar.

> all it has is garbage collection and a network effect.

It didn't have much of an advantage at the time either. It's advantage was that Sun was willing to shower SPARC boxes on your university for almost nothing if you were willing to move your core curriculum to Java.

This, pretty much. Long before there was anything like Rust, Java was the memory-safe alernative to C++ for larger projects. And yes it was slow and clunky, but devs still put up with it because the benefits were so compelling.

> Java completely ate C++'s lunch in the enterprise space back around the turn of the millennium

When was that C++'s lunch? I might be wrong, but for backend dev(majority of enterprise work?) C++ was never a big thing.

Late 90s. It was before Java got hotspot. Java prior to that was incredibly slow. Microsoft's J++ was a more performant runtime than Sun/Oracle java for several years. That ultimately became C#/.Net.

C++ had the benefit of running fast but it had all the problems you can still run into today. I'll never forget that app I worked on where function deep in the stack was returning a reference to a local string variable containing html...

Late 90s to early 2000s for sure. Tons and tons of backends of various kinds were written in it. If it was Windows it was typically running on COM/DCOM, and in UNIX it was usually CORBA. Sure, the UI was typically written in something else. Dawn of the Web with CGI, and if we are talking desktop people would use something like Visual Basic, Power Builder, or Delphi. But C++ pretty much dominated that space until Java got decent enough and fast enough.

Before Java, C++ was basically the only game in town for frontend and backend. There was always Visual Basic on Windows, and C, and a smattering of various pascal flavors.

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