Comment by eropple | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eropple | Hacker News Reader

This is really troubling to me. I'm a Scala developer and JVM nerd by trade (though more devops and high-level architecture as of late) and I've been hoping really hard that they'd just bite the bullet, flag-day the current type erasure and non-unified type system, and make Java 10 what...well, what the CLR is, now, today. The generic specialization route they describe is at best gross, isn't much better than what Scala already does today, and kicks the real problems only slightly further down the road.

Still being crap in 2017, when the alternatives are good to great now, is dangerous, and Oracle's fear of alienating the masses of people who'll forever be two versions of Java behind is leaving the door open for Microsoft. I write games in C# in my free time, and between how great VS/R# is[1] and Microsoft supporting a CLR implementation I am inclined to trust more than Mono's on Linux and OS X, I'm excited at the prospect of being able to use .NET for server applications (no, no Windows Server for me, not now and not never) in the future.

[1] - IntelliJ comes close, but it does suffer, from a usability standpoint, from being cross-platform and having to compromise--I'd rather run a VM on my Mac to use VS than use IntelliJ, all things considered!

I think a lot of people would see things differently.

.NET is much less a threat to Java today than it were 10 years ago. Today Windows is no longer the dominant platform, you have Scala for people wanting more advanced language features, you have Android and web applications are in general preferred over desktop applications. And if you are writing desktop applications then you need to take into account the Mac platform where .NET is at best a second class citizen.

And when it comes to IDE: I find IntelliJ far better than VS from nearly every standpoint - I simply don't understand your last remark.

As far as .Net's future as illustrated, Android is not the preferred target for most mobile developers; iOS is, and currently the best cross platform runtime is based on mono/.net. Time will tell if cross platform server software programming catches on (my hunch is that it will with more mature frameworks). Kestrel and .net core 5 are a huge assault on java on the server, and warrant attention from oracle.

As far as the IDE's, I've used both and can say that I vastly prefer Visual Studio paired with ReSharper (the R# in the previous comment). This is the first comment I've seen in a public forum, actually, that says that VS is not better than IntelliJ.

Count me also in the camp of someone who has never heard a person choose Intellij over VS with Resharper who has used both for any significant time.

As for .NET, if it were a viable Linux server side VM, C# would be a very compelling language in comparison to any of the JVM languages. It blows Java out of the water, and even as a full time Scala developer, I'd have a hard time arguing against it vs Scala because the things I love about Scala come with so many things I hate.

Heh. I guess with the IDE's there is quite a bit of personal taste involved but believe me I am not the only who prefers IntelliJ.

Wrt. the other things; the way I see it .NET-support outside Windows has been "vapourware" since .NET's inception. It simply has not happened. In the beginning I thought this was MS's deliberate strategy but now the tables have turned and as a sinister business strategy it does not make sense anymore.

I have no more love for Oracle than I have for MS and I would love to see something as solid, cross-platform and performant as the JVM from MS but it just is not there.

Cross-platform and performant? Wait six months. (My friends in a position to know say sooner, but I'm a pessimist.)

Ok. I have been waiting since 2002 so what is another 6 months? :-)

https://github.com/aspnet/KestrelHttpServer

don't need to wait much longer; it's already faster than nodejs for trivial benchmarks and getting better every day.

There are a lot of problems with reification. It's a real strait-jacket. It would kill the JVM as a platform for Clojure and Ruby and kill some of the advanced parts of Scala.

Interesting! Could you expand on that or direct me to some good links on the subject?

I talked with Vlad Ureche (from the EPFL Scala Team) about this very topic a few months ago after Scala Days Berlin. He said that some Scala features would not be possible to implement on the CLR because of its restrictive generics implementation. So while JVMs generics type erasure is a pain, it seems to give more room for innovation on the language level.

Unfortunately I did not understand the specific reasons he gave, but it had to do something with reification.

I'd be interested in what parts of Scala that an intelligent implementation of reification would harm.

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