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Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

>But who needs a Turbo Pascal, when you have 128Gb of RAM attached to an 5GHz CPU, for a hastily-written, bloated Java program to burn?

I mean we are in 2024 and should be well past the Java joke. Not only is modern Java seriously fast and could be efficient as well as natively compiled with Graal. ( Where 20 years ago GCJ was experimental at best ). The modern equivalent should really be Electron.

But back on the topic, I really miss Pascal and Delphi.

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There are still aspects where Java is lacking: JVM startup time and memory usage. While you can work around the former with Graal native images, this messes with dynamic loading of classes and with reflection, which means you can’t do it for any random Java application or library.

At least with Java you can select a GC which is more aggressive in giving memory back to the system (Shenandoah and ZGC). With Electron/Node you don't even get that (not to mention the fact Electron apps always spawn multiple processes).

The "Java resource hog" is still a thing...in a few areas.

As an Android dev, I still see complaints (most likely by beginners) saying how Android Studio consumes much RAM and asking if it's possible to replace it with.. VSCode. I still remember doing Android development using Eclipse on a 2 GB PC and it was reasonably okay-ish. Of course it's practically impossible to use Android Studio on such machine. 8 GB is bare minimum.

"resource hog" is a thing. Eclipse is java as well.

Well fair point. During my university days, there were 2 prominent Java-based IDEs: Eclipse and Netbeans.

Even after installing some plugins, Eclipse ran faster, and thus become my primary IDE. I kinda miss Eclipse. On the other side, seems like most Java dev nowadays already switch to IntelliJ.

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