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Comment by MagicMoonlight | Hacker News Reader

Even if everything was just written in java we’d be better off than the current system of embedding chrome into a python instance and then running a webserver in javascript to render a document.

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at $DAYJOB we're in the (slow) process of replacing a tool written in Java with its successor tool, which is a web app. the Java tool works great and has reasonably snappy performance. the web app is terribly slow (at least 0.75 jiras), frequently hangs, and is often unusable for simple tasks. it's been miserable enough to make me miss the Java Era.

I will start measuring things in jiras, thanks :)

Also I bet the reason is more of architecture in your web app. It's harder to make it as fast, for sure, but it shouldn't hang or be unusable.

I wish we could do anything about it, but it's a third-party SaaS (like everything else these days...)

I don't think replacing one bad idea with another bad idea is a good idea ;) I'm also not sure if Java would be less bad in that case. At least JS has years of research that went into making it start fast, not only run fast after warmup.

Is this "years of research" the reason why most Electron apps still start slower than - for example - IntelliJ IDEA, which is written in Java and Swing?

Modern Java has Coordinated Restore at Checkpoint (CRaC) as well as ways to compile it to native binaries that can start very fast (GraalVM & Substrate VM). The former has the benefit of a JIT as well!

Have you used any of these? I’m looking for ways to speed up start time of JVM, but almost options I’ve seen so far are “experimental” and not sure best route to take. For example was sad to see ahead of time compile being removed from JDK.

Just imagine if those years of research went into a good language instead. Instead of expending a huge amount of effort making an inherently slow language perform reasonably, we could have taken a reasonable language like Rust and made it so good it would legitimately push computing forward.

And then all you web devs could still compile rust to wasm. wasm is already faster than JS anyway. JS was a mistake.

If that were true, then eclipse would be faster than VS Code, right?

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