Microsoft unveils its own Java distribution | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft unveils its own Java distribution

infoworld.com

34 pointsjmartrican28 comments

I wonder how many years they must have been waiting for a ruling on Oracle vs. Google so they could announce this.

Corollary: https://i.imgur.com/JfqKVdo.png

I would imagine ever since J++.

Yup. I wrote a Microsoft Java book that was published by Morgan Kaufman right before the legal problems. Too bad, I had some neat stuff in the book.

> Microsoft has seen increasing growth in customer use of Java across the company’s cloud services and development tools.

Interesting to see that MS is seeing "increasing growth" in Java yet I get the feeling that many HN commenters have written it off.

The JVM and associated ecosystem of libraries and build tools is still well-regarded and popular, even if Java-the-language isn't viewed as sexy.

Java has gotten a bit sexier lately but if it's not for you, you can try Kotlin, Scala, or one of the other dozens of languages that can compile against the JVM.

And of course there is an endless and growing number of code bases in the Java language and that won't be changing anytime soon.

HN self-selects for people searching for the latest things.

solid point

agreed

Java isn't cool anymore. If you looked at the HN front-page you'd think almost all new software is being written in Rust, for example

There was never time when Java was cool. It was always language to get the job done, basically.

There does exist a lot of Java code, and this just seems more like an MS attempt to try to entice them to their "cloud" with their own Java stack.

Even if the world stopped writing new Java tomorrow, Microsoft could see years of growth just from people migrating their existing Java code to Azure.

Android isn't going away anytime soon. Its important to remember the HN is a bubble that may not always represent the broader world...

HN is not representative of pretty much anything. It is very biased self selected sample, basically.

Is this timed with the Supreme Court decision? Would we be seeing this if the decision had gone the other way? Obviously they didn’t put all this together since Tuesday, but the timing makes me wonder.

It has nothing to do with it. There are plenty of JVM vendors already. You either pass the test suite and call it Java, or don’t call it Java. Also, it is a fork of OpenJDK, so the test suite is free even.

The point of all this is that the platform doesn’t get fragmented, one can trivially migrate from one VM to another. J++ was sued to oblivion for adding Windows only features.

It has to be. I'm assuming they used this internally until now.

Would internal use have even been legal if the decision had gone Oracle's way?

> Would internal use have even been legal if the decision had gone Oracle's way?

OpenJDK is GPL, so I suppose yes. I also understand that the cause for Oracle-Google lawsuit predates the GPL JDK (Google does not like GPL on Android userland after all), so its an entirely different problem.

Of course, IANAL.

Please tell me it’s called Coffee.

I'll add to that and say J++ is making a comeback.

For those who don't know the history: https://www.cnet.com/news/sun-microsoft-settle-java-suit/

It looks like they don’t have M1 builds for macOS. Too bad.

I think that Apple ships native M1 JDK, but I am away from my laptop so I can’t check. JetBrains supports native M1 now.

Obviously this is a bit reductive, but isn't an MS openjdk build essentially C# minus win32 Apis?

But what about C#?

Yes, what about it?

Are we going to see Java.NET then?

And then NET.Java?

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