News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Malloc envy. Parent comment

Re:Malloc envy by jerf on Monday April 04, 2016 @06:36PM (#11426298)
Like (somewhat ironically) Javascript, Java's origins can be very easy to forget, and also like Javascript, both are surprisingly humble. Javascript was banged together in a week, and Java was intended to be a language for developing constrained set-top box UIs in the 1990s. While that does not render them intrinsically unsuitable after decades of development for the sort of tasks that they are put to today, the early days of a language still inevitably color it forever when backwards compatibility is a big concern.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Malloc envy by haberman on Tuesday April 05, 2016 @01:26PM (#11432394)
I don't buy this at all. The original Java whitepaper from 1995 mentions both multithreading and JIT compilation: http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~mckeeman/cs118/references/Origi...

It even says that the byte-code format was specifically designed with JIT compilation in mind:

> The byte code can be translated on the fly (at runtime) into machine code for the particular CPU the application is running on. For those used to the normal design of a compiler and dynamic loader, this is somewhat like putting the final machine code generator in the dynamic loader.

> The byte code format was designed with this in mind, so the actual process of generating machine code is generally simple. Reasonably good code is produced: it does automatic register allocation and the compiler does some optimization when it produces the bytecode.

The idea that JIT compilation was retroactively bolted onto the Java ecosystem is absurd. Perhaps more than any other technology, Java brought JIT compilation into the mainstream, starting more than 20 years ago.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Malloc envy by sangnoir on Monday April 04, 2016 @06:49PM (#11426371)
To distill your contribution to its essence:

Parent: what's wrong with the JVM as a multithreaded-JIT?

You: Java is similar to Javascript. Javascript was terribly designed in the 90's. Therefore Java sucks . QED.

You should try your hand at politics! Don't answer the question (Java), instead, segue into the more comfortable topic/what you want to talk about (Javascript)

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Malloc envy by Manishearth on Tuesday April 05, 2016 @02:54AM (#11428383)
Um, jerf gave a reason why Java's history affects it here and noted how it's similar to Javascript in that regard on the side; not the other way around. The JS comparison was not part of their argument.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Malloc envy by sangnoir on Saturday April 09, 2016 @01:52PM (#11462371)
But that has nothing to do with the question he is responding to; regarding Java's suitability as a multithreaded JIT
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Malloc envy by jerf on Tuesday April 05, 2016 @09:06AM (#11430015)
Tu quoque.
[ Parent | on HN ]