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Comment by donatj | Hacker News Reader

> For the people who say that Minecraft should have been written in C++ […] there's Bedrock Edition. Nobody I know cares about it enough to play it.

Been playing for just under ten years, everyone I know plays Bedrock these days. I built and manage a very popular tool / Minecraft community and while I don’t have actual numbers, my general sense is the majority of players run either console or mobile Minecraft - all of which are Bedrock at this point.

If you don’t care about modding or particularly complex redstone, I don’t know why you wouldn’t run Bedrock. It’s far more stable, reliable and performant. My laptops fans rarely come on in Bedrock but never shut off in Java.

In my eyes Java is the public prototype / feature target and Bedrock the actual product.

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It's probably worth noting that Minecraft has an incredibly lackadaisical approach to Java and Java upgrades in general. They're still on Java 8 and thinking maybe about upgrading to Java 11 at some point, although the performance benefits of going to the latest versions are really quite enormous in almost any benchmark.

There's an additional problem: when Notch first wrote it, he had some experience of doing games on the JVM and wrote the code in a performance sensitive style. But it wasn't a fully OOP style that people associate with clean, well designed codebases, so when Notch moved on, they immediately went and introduced tons of tiny classes for things like points or vectors where the prior code simply passed the components as parameters. That trashed performance. Again, newer JVMs are better at gobbling this stuff up, but it didn't help. Valhalla will eventually remove this tradeoff.

At any rate, Minecraft is a very good example of why more people should target the JVM for video games: modding is real, it can create communities that propel your game further than ever. It's not a great example of how to get the best possible game performance from the JVM. At all.

> It’s far more stable, reliable and performant

I'd bet this has more to do with the fact that the Java version started out as a one-man project (that wasn't even expected to take off), whereas Bedrock started as a multimillion-dollar project by Microsoft who a) knew the project scope ahead of time, and b) could hire a (presumably) world-class team to design and implement it

Personally I've never had real performance issues with either

That's curious. I don't play Minecraft myself but my kids do. They have Bedrock Edition (via Nintendo Switch) and they keep begging me to get them the Java Edition. This is partly because it seems all the prominent YouTubers are on Java Edition.

the java edition is significantly more predictable and less buggy. even regarding redstone it is not that bedrock redstone doesn't work* but that contraptions are significantly less deterministic than on java

* some very used redstone features on java are clearly bugs and rightly so are not on bedrock, but even those have a very specific and exploitable use

>I don’t know why you wouldn’t run Bedrock

Because not everybody runs Windows? I don't consider mobile and console platforms as gaming, but that's just my biases.

> Because not everybody runs Windows? I don't consider mobile and console platforms as gaming, but that's just my biases.

Most PC gamers use Windows, consoles or devices. The non-Windows gaming market is very small.

While I prefer Java edition, my kid much prefers Bedrock, because it has the main killer feature of being able to share a world directly with friends. Anyone that's an XBox Live friend can see when they're playing on-line, and join the world. No need to set up a realm, run my own server online somewhere, or punch a hole through the firewall to the minecraft server at home etc.

I actually personally run the Bedrock Android version on my Mac with a launcher. It’s a little temperamental but still preferable to Java Edition in my eyes. I mostly play on Windows and Xbox however.

- https://mcpelauncher.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ - it’s out of date but they link a fork that works.

> I don't consider mobile and console platforms as gaming, but that's just my biases.

Gatekeep much? You know that you just excluded probably 90% of all gamers right there?

wtf.

Mobile I was used to, but consoles as well is next level gatekeeping.

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