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Comment by spricket | Hacker News Reader

This has already happened in a way. Unity uses a ton of C# for scripting. While C# is somewhat nicer to work with, this low pause GC makes java a compelling option for moving much more logic into the VM language

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Keep in mind that C# has support for non-primitive value types (structs) which means you can avoid garbage collection entirely if you're careful (not all that difficult in my experience). Additionally, Unity has just introduced a specialized low-latency garbage collector in their beta build. Overall, from where I'm standing, Java doesn't look very appealing for game development.

Lack of value types sucks so yes I agree. On the other hand this new GC might be fast enough that it just doesn't matter if you create garbage for most purposes

Yeah, I do wonder how Unity deals with the GC. Maybe there's an algorithm like this one, maybe the engine's core systems (physics and graphics) are written in native code.

C# as a language does tend to be nicer than Java, but its VM doesn't have as rich a family of languages.

My limited understanding is that high end Unity devs code their stuff not to make garbage. Unity has a very nice system for profiling that sort of thing.

Also, CLR has F#, which I like much better than Scala (and, no type erasure in CLR), Clojure which is ... just like Clojure on JVM, and C#, which as a Java dev since 1.1 I have come to prefer as a language even as I remain JVM ecosystem preferring on the server side. JVM has ABCL, a neat Common Lisp, and now Graal/Truffle which is super interesting. If not for Clojure though (and maybe Kotlin) I would probably give up on the JVM. Oracle does not help. Just my opinion.

Totally agree. C# and kin are far better designed. It's the lively Java ecosystem that keeps me around as well

Less “lively Java ecosystem” - more “slow-moving Enterprise Java environments”.

Is Clojure on CLR actively maintained?

Yes, it's one of the officially supported platforms (albeit the least used one).

I did just remember that C# has value-type data structures (which last I checked, Java didn't) which probably helps a lot. Most objects can probably be kept on the stack, and objects on the stack don't need to be garbage collected.

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