Hacker News Reader

Comment by Apreche | Hacker News Reader

Petition: Programmers, stop using the Oracle versions of Java. Too many of your Java programs only work properly with Oracle JVM, etc. Instead, standardize on another one of the Java implementations so that it can become the premiere implementation and really screw with Oracle.

View on HN

Which other Java implementations? Apache's is abandoned. OpenJDK is basically still Oracle. What's left? IBM's JDK?

I'm really a bit surprised that there's not a prominent fork of OpenJDK by now, concentrating on the VM and not the Java compiler ("OpenJVM").

Tail calls, value types, easier direct calls to C to process large regions of data without copying (e.g. lapack): there are many things which could benefit non-Java languages on the JVM like Clojure and Scala that are taking too long with Oracle stewardship (as they did with Sun's as well). Maybe these things are in fact too hard to implement for small or unfunded groups?

I hope not, I think it's high time.

Probably because of the requirements Oracle would place on the fork to call it "Java" and give access to the TCK. They have said the only open source projects that would receive a TCK are forks of OpenJDK, but then you can't re-license it very friendly and who knows what other restrictions Oracle would put on you.

Some of us (especially in the performance-oriented crowd, or people using large heaps) really have no choice here.

Zing? Not that that really stands a chance of becoming the new standard because of licensing costs.

I'm curious, are other Java implementations (e.g. OpenJDK) really that bad? I mean, quite a lot of influential/resourceful companies are behind it, are they unwilling or unable to improve it?

The OpenJDK project is run by Oracle.

Having done a bit of Clojure and some server-side Java here and there: what depends on an Oracle JVM? I think I've always used open versions...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com