Re:“I am literally losing sleep” over Java (1996)
by tombert on Thursday January 06, 2022 @12:44PM
(#29826838)
Despite my love for the language (and Stack has mostly fixed this), I feel like Haskell's "Cabal Hell" is amongst my least-favorite headaches from my past.
Getting weird, hard to follow conflicts between different packages on Hackage and dealing with weird compiler hack flags is something that never got fun or easy.
Re:“I am literally losing sleep” over Java (1996)
by alexjplant on Thursday January 06, 2022 @11:41AM
(#29825834)
The things you mention are no fun either (`node-gyp` in particular), but the Java issues I encountered were far beyond run-of-the-mill runtime linking and interop issues you describe. The details are lost to time and a bit fuzzy but I recall the primary issue being competing CDI implementations stepping on each other when we tried to use JSF with a recent version of Spring... and because most everything in the Java ecosystem was doing some opaque Aspect4J magic it was nigh-impossible to debug.
The term "DLL Hell" came from Windows development before it. The Node/Ruby/Python equivalent is getting native libraries to build (node-gyp, I'm looking at you!). I've burned days in Ruby Version Hell and Node Version Hell. Javascript dependency upgrades are a nightmare compared to Java dependency upgrades.
I don't think this problem has gone away, or even improved. It's just a grim fact of life, and Java doesn't deserve special mention.