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Comment by ExpiredLink | Hacker News Reader

> Java. A bit better. Compare the readability of OpenJDK's ArrayList.java to the STL vector.h, which does essentially the same thing: http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk7/jdk7/jdk/file/00cd9dc3c2b5/s.... But of course the Java standard library is immense and has a lot of cruft in it.

Really? Java's success is - rightly - attributed to its simple and usable libraries.

> To write clean Java you really need to avoid much of the standard library (read Effective Java by Josh Bloch)

Lol, the standard ArrayList.java is written by ... Josh Bloch!

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Yeah, ArrayList is fine. I was saying the code is cleaner than its C++ equivalent.

There are many parts of the Java library to avoid. Some are obsolete and terrible, like CORBA or java serialization. Others are gotchas w weird semantics, like Object.clone(). Others are just bad API design--eg the built in IO libs don't require a Charset argument. The default is the "system default charset", which is apparently still the obsolete MacRoman if you're on OSX.

The most annoying are those shortcomings of the std library that cause extra complexity. For example, the built-in JUL logging framework sucks enough that almost everyone uses log4j or logback instead. But now you have user libraries using incompatible logging frameworks. Enter slf4j, a shim that ties them all together.

In my experiemce, Go is a breath of fresh air.

Another example of "Wtf were they thinking when they wrote this?" in the Java stdlib is MessageDigest. To build a digester object, you must pass it a string literal to tell it which algorithm to use, and catch a NoSuchAlgorithm exception. Instead of, you know, just using an enum for all supported algorithms.

I think standard Java library API doesn't know what algorithms are supported on particular platform, additionally you can implement your own messagedigest.

Right - if I understand correctly, it can depend on what crypto packages are installed on your target.

They list the algorithms explicitly here:

https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/security/Mess...

And here:

https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/technotes/guides/secur...

> In my experiemce, Go is a breath of fresh air.

Let's see where Go will be in 20 years.

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