Comment by kmasters | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kmasters | Hacker News Reader

Im OK with that, I think that libre office is open source as much as chrome is and opera launched it this week. So anyone could repackage open source office software in Java.

We need to ask bigger questions. As someone who has made a career out of Java and made over a million dollars doing it, I really dont see Java as a platform anymore.

I love the integration, and the support that you get with a dead language because its been around so long.

But Java is dead. Has been for a long time.

Im typing this on a desktop with 32GB of ram. Java cant use even that small sum of cheap ram without huge GC pauses, and it never will.

Java has tons of frameworks, some of the very good, but most of them are not. And Java never delivered on its promises and now we are seeing tons of languages port themselves to what is a great VM for JIT compilation, but completely unusable in real world use.

The JVM cant even use 32GB of ram efficiently, and yet we can buy servers with 256GB of ram for 5K.

Java has made a fortune for me, but not in the way it should have. Java will not survive the next 10 years. Get off the platform unless you want to do maintenance.

While I am not a cheerleader for the JVM, I would take issue with one statement.

"Java cant use even that small sum of cheap ram without huge GC pauses, and it never will."

It is true that the Hotspot JVM is awful in this regard but Zing, from Azul, has claimed to offer a pauseless GC for very large heaps. I did a tiny bit of work on their old Vega boxes (~700 cores) and know that I was able to allocate 3 Gig a second with no problems.

Now I wouldn't take my word on it, because Zing is for X86 systems and not their own custom hardware. But you can try it

http://www.azulsystems.com/press/azul-systems-announces-new-...

It gets a mention from Martin Thomson. Do a text search for Zing here

http://mechanical-sympathy.blogspot.co.uk/

I think the future is probably pretty bright for the JVM and for garbage collected languages in general.

> Java never delivered on its promises

Which promises? Write-once, run-anywhere? My last Java project lasted 15 months, during which time we had developers working on Windows and Mac, with production running CentOS. I can't recall one platform-specific bug we encountered.

> The JVM cant even use 32GB of ram efficiently, and yet we can buy servers with 256GB of ram for 5K.

I've used Java for line-of-business web applications, which seems to fit within Java's wheelhouse. I'd be terrified to work on any purchase order system that required a 32GB heap to run. On that project referenced above, we maximized the use of cheap, larger servers the way many companies do now -- by running several smaller VMs on them that each contain one application.

> Java will not survive the next 10 years.

Which is saying that Android will not survive the next 10 years as well?

Out of curiosity, what was the segment you were/are in where you built your career on Java?

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