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Comment by neilellis | Hacker News Reader

If I could upvote this a 1000 times I would.

We need more people doing crazy sh*t like this. Java is a fantastic runtime - and a great language. But it has a huge amount of baggage. I'd love to see experiments int the open source arena playing around with alternatives to the standard Oracle JVM.

I'd love to see Android like alternatives for the desktop that re-use java's syntax but have less baggage and are not tied to Sun's view of what Java should be (Oracle's view of the language is actually a lot better than Sun's thank god).

There are countless Java developers who would like to reuse their knowledge but in a different set up. E.g. desktop not server, lightweight not heavyweight, systems level (like go/python) etc.

I keep hoping that one of these JVMs will end up going in their own direction one day not trying to achieve official Java compatibility.

Anyway kudos to the author.

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You do realise that Oracle's JVM isn't the only one and there are many open source JVM alternatives. Quite a few of which are designed for lightweight systems:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Java_virtual_machines

And I have no idea what you mean by baggage. I am assuming you mean "features" like JNI, JMX etc ?

If that is the case then the modularisation of the JVM is something that has been underway for a number of years now. It is targeted for Java 9 release:

http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jigsaw/

And there is no difference in the way Oracle or Sun has managed the JVM. Changes are still made through the JSR/JEP process.

And finally again no idea what you mean by countess Java developers wanting to reuse their knowledge but in a different environment.

Android is already an option as is Swing but honestly does anyone care about desktop apps these days ?

Baggage: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/313584/what-is-the-concep...

Yes there are many JVM:s but most of them aren't any good.

They're working on real generics for the JVM, but it's a lot of work, especially to preserve compatibility (which is why it wasn't done beforehand). If you throw out compatibility it's still a lot of work though, plus you no longer have any of the libraries.

I guess if you mean by "not any good" they're slower/less featureful than the original HotSpot JVM, then, well, yes..... you get what you pay for (in terms of resource usage).

Where have you heard that? Generics were implemented using type erasure long ago because it was deemed to hard and would break to much existing code to implement them correctly. What has change to make it feasible now? Not saying you're wrong but I haven't seen any mention of any work in that direction.

Look for project Valhalla. It's doing value types, which means you will be able to write List<int> amongst other things. Obviously that means the int type cannot be erased in that context.

Nothing in particular has changed, but full generics C++ style imply value types, and value types are now on the table whereas before they were not (other higher priorities, I guess).

I mean we carry stuff around from the days when we (the Java community) felt 'more is good' - you know the days of spit Java Blueprints.

> And there is no difference in the way Oracle or Sun has managed the JVM

Yet coincidentally more positive changes have happened to the language in the last 3 years than the previous 10? I see a language that was dying on it's feet coming back to life - so hence my feelings about Oracle's stewardship (right or wrong!).

> And finally again no idea what you mean by countess Java developers wanting to reuse their knowledge but in a different environment.

Almost every Java programmer I know and/or meet has their 'other language'. That they use to solve problems that Java has failed in. But a common frustration is the need to relearn a similar but subtly different syntax. Concrete examples are NodeJS (and hence Nashorn, Vert.x et al) for lightweight format neutral APIs. Android for mobile :-) so hat's a win. Go for systems (Python in the past). Objective-C et al Desktop.

For me there is no concrete reason why we can't have these in Java (language). But in doing so we need to be willing to throw away components that don't fit. I.e. existing APIs, existing philosophies. Java is much more than the language, however so when tackling problems that aren't large scale serverside applications we need to adapt if we are to reuse. This is an area that I very much am interested in seeing develop. My specific case in hand is Android - which reuses Java skills but has a lot less to do with normal Java programming.

Hope that clarifies a bit.

Well, I'm fine with the link because it says it was just done for learning, but you'll never get anything practically useful out of this. The performance of the real JVM is decades ahead...

Baggage? Do you want to say 'garbage'?

+1 for "baggage collection" ;D

What is the "baggage" of Java? This is just a JVM and Java's JVM has no much more baggage than any other implementation. In order for this to be practical in terms of performance, reliability, and so on, years have to pass and meanwhile Oracle JDK and OpenJDK are not gonna stay still.

As a side note, I really wonder how an engineer can use ghetto talk like "crazy sh*t" and especially in this forum here.

> ghetto talk

Excuse me?

I'm sorry you're offended, maybe that's part of your lingo, too, but "crazy sht" is ghetto talk. Indeed. A self-respected and honorable engineer pays attention to detail - not only in their work, but in their language as well and especially in the meticulous choice of words. English is not my native tongue, but I respect it very much, and the language I respect does not include phrases such as "crazy sht" - it's a rich and very expressive language and only the severely incapacitated include those in their written communication.

First of all, saying that profanity is "ghetto talk" is racist. Ghettos are places that (often poor and persecuted) minorities[1] are pressured to live. So what you said was far more offensive than saying "crazy shit"[2].

Second, wealthier people swear more[3]. So not only are you racist, you're also wrong.

Third, there's a great deal of research showing the usefulness of profanity. It conveys emotional content in a way that other words can't. If you refuse to accept and understand profanity, you're neutering the language.

1. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ghetto

2. (On that note, "ghetto" is often used by racist Americans as a pejorative euphemism for "black".)

3. http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/04/10/nine-things-you-probably...

There's not one or two races in a ghetto - I've been in some myself, so, let's not abuse the "R" word. "Crazy sht" is not swearing, not even profanity; it's just weak speech and a cliche that needs to be eradicated - the whole "sht" thing stinks, literally.

A ghetto is, by definition, mostly populated by minority races. It might be several minorities, but it must be minorities. You say you love English, so you should be particularly sensitive to using a word as it's defined.

What you said was racist, whether you intended it to be or not. Look up the definition and use the word "ghetto" correctly in the future. Using a very loaded word incorrectly is far weaker than saying "crazy shit".

Speaking of crazy shit: if it's neither swearing nor profanity, why won't you spell it correctly in your quotes?

Anyway, your argument here isn't intellectual unless you have some functionally equivalent suggestion to replace "crazy shit" with. And, like I said, profanity has additional emotional content, so you can't replace it with anything that isn't profane without losing some meaning.

Bullshit (pun intended)! You confuse ethnicity with race. In California where I live, the ghettos are populated by the majority race [0]. Regarding the spelling, I used the OP's spelling to stress out.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_California

Sorry, I wanted to use "sh*t", but a single asterisk actually acts as a special formatting character. Too late, I can't edit it.

Yo bitches, I am not an engineer - you may have noticed that this is Hacker News - not Engineering Weekly. I ain't never built any machinery - or designed no bridges - I'm just mo programming wit deez wild fingers.

Take it easy - until you know the language well enough to know when someone is using a complement like 'crazy sh*t' - I wouldn't rush to judge them. Context is everything - as the first two words of this comment attest. Context is everything :-)

Impotent language, sorry.

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