Upgrades now are pretty straightforward if you are past JKD 9 - with JDK 16-17 being a bit tricky, but less than JDK 9.
Using so called LTS without paying for it is in no way different from using latest. You get similarly tested software and no one to call if you need a security fix asap.
That depends. If most people follow the advice of "sticking to LTS", these versions will have way more users, and thus will be more "battle-tested", as in tested in production.
Support for vulnerability patches, stability, and so on. You can automatically update and maybe that goes well and maybe problems are caught in testing. Regardless those events and changes have over time have increased costs. LTS should mean lower costs both through increased support focus, increased population of active users, and reduced forced change.
You're not wrong...
And many companies are cheap and don't buy - hence using JDK 17 won't give you LTS, buying support gives you LTS.
Non-LTS JDK doesn't have anything after 6 months.
And BTW. Azul MTS want's to have a word with you: https://www.azul.com/products/azul-support-roadmap/
e.g. JDK 13 and 15 do get builds.
In some cases, this may be your ops team.
Source?
In other words, OpenJDK does not follow any LTS/non-LTS release cycle. Hence there is nothing special about Java 17 vs 16 when it comes to stability.
There haven't been any notable language features added since java 9 besides some basic syntax sugar (which is already covered by stuff like lombok anyway).
For features and performance you might as well just target .NET 6. It has things that have been perpetually 'too hard to implement' (read: oracle doesn't want to pay their engineers to impl it and will sue you if you do it yourself) like value types, generics without type erasure, no checked exceptions, etc. and with .NET 6 performance is better than OpenJDK across the board.
.NET 6 is vastly more performant than .NET 5, which was already faster than openjdk and openj9 (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/performance-improvemen...)
> and also what do you mean by oracle suing if you implement value types?
this one shouldn't need an explanation, oracle very commonly pursues frivolous lawsuits as a way of bullying money out of businesses that don't have the budget to fight them for years in various courts.
I do find people comparing Java and .NET Core often are compare apples to oranges however. Working on both languages it is just my opinion but the .NET platform is newer - it has a better "base" even without the same man hours. Much of the engineering time in both ecosystems is spent optimising for code typical to that ecosystem which is affected by history/legacy like any other software system.
The previous versions in this stream (.NET Core 2.1, .NET Core 3.0 and 3.1) also run fine on Linux. For web server / API server workloads, it's been stable for a lot longer than 11 months, and people do indeed "bet the farm" or "run the business" on it, quite happily.
Technically, this starts with .NET core 2.1 on 2018-05-30. The prior version, 2.0, released on 2017-08-14, wasn't _quite_ there yet although some people were happy with it for production use.
.NET Core 2.0 (August 2017) we assume.
Have you even seen the benchmarks compared to Java and other languages?
https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r20&hw=...
If you're not paying attention to .NET its time to get your head out of the sand, seriously.
"no real reason" is a stupid take. I could list multiple, but a big one is that there are hundred java developers for each dotnet developer in my city. The java env is well tested and well understood, if anything one should argue why not use it instead of a hip and trendy alternative.
In what way? It's slower and has less features than the .NET runtime.
> "no real reason" is a stupid take. I could list multiple, but a big one is that there are hundred java developers for each dotnet developer in my city. The java env is well tested and well understood, if anything one should argue why not use it instead of a hip and trendy alternative.
So, your only credible excuse for using java is inertia from boomers and middle managers refusing to adapt from the standard of the early and mid 2000s?
If you come in and freely migrate all of the Java codebases to .NET while maintaining code quality and functionalities, I'm sure many people would let you do it. If you don't understand why people stick to one language, that means that you've never worked on a big codebase, or completly ignore the business side of the developer job. In both cases, that's a lack of wisdom on your part.
Perhaps not solved, but at least partially addressed with value classes[1] and reified type parameters[2].
[1] https://kotlinlang.org/docs/inline-classes.html
[2] https://kotlinlang.org/docs/inline-functions.html#reified-ty...
pretty odd take, in which country?
Lots of people use .NET in enterprise, I don't know where you got that impression.
Regardless, i actually compared Java with .NET and their web frameworks as a part of my bachelors', everything from synthetic benchmarks for encryption and data processing and transformations, to things like shuffling JSON around. Now, it's all in Latvian and was a number of years ago, so it's not entirely relevant at this point, but i did have some tangible findings.
In short:
- both Java and .NET (then Core) are inconsistent in their performance - there are certain things which are slower in one technology than other by not using external optimized libraries. For example, Java had problems with writing deeply nested dynamically generated JSON with JavaEE libraries (now Jakarta), whereas .NET Core had problems with handling large amounts of text
- their performance was largely comparable in most other tests, neither was faster by a factor of 10, like you'd see with Python and Ruby compared to either
- thus, it's largely a matter of choosing the actual frameworks that you'll want to utilize properly and consider both the job market and business factors (familiarity with the tech stack, job market etc.)
- in summary, they're close enough for it to not be a technical decision most of the time in real world circumstances (save for a few exceptions), but rather is a decision that depends on social elements
- i don't believe that the observation of them being "close enough" has changed much, both in legacy code and otherwise
- .NET Core and now .NET 6 has improved bunches with its runtime; Core was so successful it's essentially the future of the platform (i feel bad for developers who'll be tricked into working on legacy code with the old .NET and IIS, versus the new one and Kestrel)
- JDK has improved bunches with its runtime and GC; the runtime situation is a bit complicated and cumbersome, considering the OP's article, but overall it's pretty usable, especially with frameworks like Quarkus
If you jump around the different tabs that compare which frameworks do what better, on average:
- .NET is better for plain text
- .NET is noticeably better for data updates
- Java is noticeably better for JSON serialization
- Java is noticeably better for single DB queries
- Java is noticeably better for multiple DB queries
- as for cached queries and other use cases, there's more variance
- neither is better than the other for it to matter a lot
In short, you're not necessarily wrong - there have indeed been great improvements to the .NET platform and it's good to see it finally being a capable and performant tech stack that you can use on *nix. But you're also not right: Java is getting similar attention, even though it's still lagging behind a few years in regards to "having its stuff together" (e.g. going from Oracle JDK to a more stable model + the JDK 8 to newer version shift, which is similarly painful with old .NET versions).
To lighten the mood, i'd consider suggesting that anyone also have a look at Go, which is similarly performant and allows you to build runtime independent executables by default, which is easier than in either .NET or Java. It's also pretty easy to write and has seen good use for the development of tools, since its startup time is a tad better than either that of Java or .NET as well. Here's the three compared: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r20&hw=...
All of this is currently being implemented in project Valhalla...
It's comparing apples to oranges - in this case .NET is also being actively worked on so may have other things by then. Compare current state only.
The truth is each platform has prioritized features relevant to its context. For what its worth in my experience while the JVM has many more JIT optimisations and the like it tends to need them more of them given the lack of some of those features you mention (e.g. value types). Whereas .NET code allows value types, better management of memory (i.e. Span), reified generics etc so the focus has been to allow the user to optimise themselves where required where still allowing for a decent performance default. Many of the optimisations in the JVM wouldn't have the same bang for buck in .NET and vice versa.
On a personal note I'm more of a fan of the .NET philosophy because the code is usually fast enough, and when I need to tune memory, avoid allocations, and do fast code it seems to offer more tools not in an unsafe context to do so. It allows a better "upper bound" of performance for core things IMO while keeping to bytecode/IL. Many benchmarks where the same level of application optimisation has occured from what I seen have confirmed this bias for me. YMMV
You could call `+` syntatic sugar, just like anything past assembler being that.
None of those are features, they were desperately needed shorthands for common java idioms. This is like calling braceless if/for/while statements 'features', when they're purely syntax sugar that has fallen out of favor completely because there's been several major security vulns found in major projects due to their use and development oversight/code review failure (https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2014/02/24/anatomy-of-a-got...), to the point where most companies ban writing them.
Just off the top of my head:
* LINQ. Added to C# in 2007, Java didn't get streams until 2014.
* structs/value types, implemented in net framework and net core for 15+ years, but not present in java 17. Some oracle engineers have been working to implement them under project valhalla but it seems to be vaporware at this point after 8+ years of work.
* unsigned types, no plans to implement in java (though IIRC it was originally planned as part of valhalla)
* async/await
At the feature level Java is stuck in the mid 2000s. Nobody wants to do the actual work on keeping it competitive.
Thank God they didn't shove this crap in. When Loom ships (I believe the next LTS is their target, more or less), JVM will have the same concurrency story as Go does, without blue/green function split like in C#.
Not too comfortable to use functions that will compile to efficient byte code exists for them, but with the definitely coming Valhalla, it will be trivial to create a custom primitive class for unsigned ints.
> async/await
With project Loom, it will avoid the mistake of function coloring that async introduces. In a managed language, why not let the runtime automatically transform blocking calls to non-blocking, when it already knows what’s up?
Not saying it's a good or bad thing, but .NET and C# by extension has had these features for years (decades in some cases) while the only thing java has are half-baked prototypes and plans to 'maybe' implement things. In many cases these plans just get endlessly pushed back and new java major versions just become a pile of simple bugfixes which in the past were just pushed as minor jre updates.
In the background, coroutines are a strictly less useful feature than what will happen with Loom, and please show me any “promised feature” that were only half-baked prototypes? We do have one half of Valhalla (vector api) under an experimental flag with JDK 17 already, several language related JEPs were shipped already. That Loom and primitive classes take their time only mean that they are not vaporware, because these are actually ridiculously complex problems.
Streams are a library feature, records are a language feature. Streams could be implemented outside, records could not (no lombok abominations are not records).
comparing braces to records/multi line strings/switch expressions is so funny that I won't even comment on that.
Also, Oracle does pay plenty for the development of Java, and is a (surprisingly) good steward of the language, let’s drop all the blind hate.
And both in terms of GC and JIT, the JVM ecosystem is ahead, the reason they can be so head-to-head is that the CLR doesn’t hide lower level controls all that much, allowing for better hand-tuned programs (at the price of the resulting code not getting “automatically” faster in a possible future release)