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Comment by samus | Hacker News Reader

You're living in the past. Applets and Flash lost against the HTML/JS/CSS stack and Oracle owned up to it. Applets are terminally deprecated now.

Edit: admittedly, one of the reasons for that was that the sandbox was indeed prone to security holes. Also, the developer ergonomy of the SecurityManager was unsatisfying for both JDK and app developers. Good riddance.

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I'm living in the future. We have golang and rust now. Java is a pile of junk and should be relegated to the past.

Golang's only consistent advantage over Java is lower latency on compilation, startup, and GC. OpenJDK will eventually level the playing field with Project Valhalla. In terms of FFI and language features Java has already caught up. And faster startup can be achieved with CRaC.

Rust in turn is not competing with Java.

Applets are still a thing. We just call them webasm and canvas these days.

The crucial difference is that these technologies are embedded differently. Java Applets had access to dangerous APIs that had to be restricted by the SecurityManager. Also, the JVM was installed externally to the browser, turning it into an uncontrollable component which made the browser vulnerable in turn.

The newer technologies were designed from the beginning with a well-defined security boundary and are based on a language that was designed from the beginning to be embedded. Everything is implemented within the browser and can be updated together with it.

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