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Comment by howdydoo | Hacker News Reader

I mean sure, in an ideal world one Java should work for everything. In practice, there are too many things that can go wrong with untested combinations. For better or worse, the world is moving towards bundled dependencies (Snap, Flatpak, Docker, etc). On my system, I see at least DBeaver and Arduino that ship their own JVM. I don't think it's a red flag.

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Shipping your own JVM is actually the Oracle recommended way. It's why they created jlink to create your own minimal runtime and jpackage to create your installer with that image.

Yeah imo while it’s pretty wasteful, I’m still in favor of this trend. Given the decreasing cost of storage, I’ll happily trade a bit of disk space for less wasted time on configuration, bugs, performance issues, etc.

Why do they do that in each case? Why do they need a specific version such that it it unreasonable for the regular user to have already in place?

Because as an industry we have collectively failed - both in dependency management and in version control. There are unreliable, and they are incomprehensible to an average user, no matter which operating system you use.

It is because of the strange belief that a piece of software can work reliably against a set of libraries when they were not tested together (just because somebody says they're compatible). Dependency management can work only if every piece of software is able to link directly to the versions of libraries to which they were originally released.

The dependency management must be of exact versions of libraries that must be present to work with the installed software. Instead, people believe that it is possible to manage dependencies by stated compatibility: this will never work.

If operating systems had dependency-library versioning, lookup, retrieval and verification facilities built directly into the core exposed with a proper C-API, all these problems could go away.

Our industry builds technology as advanced as jet engines, but with stone tools.

If we look at something like Minecraft - it now bundles Java. This lets them upgrade java versions without bothering every 12 year old to figure out how to do that.

Good for them, but Minecraft is neither DBeaver nor Arduino.

Because different releases are different. So just package up the releases you know work with your app.

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