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The Java ecosystems initially started with optimizing Java compilers. That setup could benefit from direct hardware support for Java bytecode. Later, it was dis
by funcDropShadow 3y ago
The Java ecosystems initially started with optimizing Java compilers. That setup could benefit from direct hardware support for Java bytecode. Later, it was discovered that it is more beneficial to remove the optimization from javac in order to provide more context to the JIT compiler. Which enables better optimizations from JIT compilers. By directly running Java bytecode, you would loose so many optimizations done by Hotspot, that it is hard to get on par just by interpreting bytecode in hardware. The story may be different for restricted JVMs that don't have a sophisticated JIT.
- miohtama 3y agoThe current (largest) end-user Java ecosystem is in practice Android and it ahead-of-time compiling ART. Java itself got very good. Though Oracle was blocked to leech money, or have return for their investment, depending on the viewpoint.
- kaba0 3y agoI don’t really get your last point - java’s improvements are due to Oracle, not despite it. They have a terrible name, but they have been excellent stewards of the platform.
- miohtama 3y agoAndroid ART would unlikely to exist if Oracle would have been enforcing licensing requirements as they wished. ART runs on devices for 1B+ users and is more relevant for the world population as Oracle. Although we can speculate likely Android would have switched to something else if Oracle were to win in the court. Ironically Android more realised Java’s original light client vision “Write once, run everywhere” if you consider “everywhere” as all around the world, by every human, with various device architectures.
- kaba0 3y agoI wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the huge deal of internet services running OpenJDK. Like, AWS itself, Apple’s backends, a huge part of Google’s infrastructure, the whole of Alibaba that is responsible for some crazy amount of transactions, just to mention a few.
- miohtama 3y agoJava is a light client programming language that found a small niche in server programming.
- kaba0 3y agoIt doesn’t really make sense to attribute the initial domain of a language to the whole platform. Especially when Java can have so many faces, and that it’s numero 1 use case is backend applications. Android is a comparatively small market.
- funcDropShadow 3y ago> Java ... found a small niche in server programming. Lol, virtually all business server applications are running on th e JVM in the corner of the world that I see.
- pjmlp 3y agoDalvik runned like shit, was only a basic interpreter at the begining, and it was Sun that was ripped off before Oracle took over. Google could have acquired Java, after screwing Sun, and decided to take a bet on not doing it.