> Removal of Nashorn JavaScript Engine
anybody know why a javascript engine was ever included in core java in the first place? seems... niche. and yet core java never included a simple web server (officially).
anybody know why a javascript engine was ever included in core java in the first place? seems... niche. and yet core java never included a simple web server (officially).
GraalVM offers interop between JavaScript, Python, Ruby, R, C/C++ and of course Java and other JVM languages.
I think GraalVM has the potential to make the JVM something of a universal platform. I guess that was the goal with Nashorn as well, but now it seems much closer to fruition.
In my limited experience writing web code, the client side concerns itself with rendering and user interaction, the server side concerns itself with efficiently supplying dynamic data to the client, and other than request payload definitions the two have no logic in common.
Of course I could rewrite it in another language, but with Nashorn I don't need to. I can execute many hundreds of lines of Javascript with around four lines of utterly boilerplate Java. And it works perfectly. I don't need to worry about edge cases or dealing with subtle variations in regular expressions (don't at me) and other string parsing nuances.
I'm just a sole developer; I don't have minions. If I had to rewrite it today I'd probably look at a transpiling approach, but even then, defensive text manipulation tends to be edge-casey at the best of times.
(Also note that my priority here is browser performance, where it's running continuously on hundreds of clients simultaneously—often budget smartphones with limited CPU power. On the server it only has to run once per submit and the CPU cost on the server is beyond trivial.)