The AWS folks benchmarked Swift is a over twice as slow as Java. https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Faws.amazon.com%2Fblogs%2Fopensource%2Fsustainability-with-rust%2F. So yeah...I think they had some legacy programmer errors or bad practices in the old Java app....or they DRASTICALLY improved Swift, which I find very unlikely.

Except it doesn't. Read Amazon's benchmarks. That very much matches my personal experience as well. I thought Go would be a lot faster...was shocked to see how slow it is. Read what the AWS Rust folks have to say about it.. I inherited a Go project and the builds took FOREVER and brought my machine to a stop....and I thought "holy fuck...they must have the world's fanciest integration tests running"...then I stepped through the code and found all they were doing was running basic input validation and JSON parsing....like remedial stuff. I still have no clue how JSON parsing and input validation can take minutes for a few thousand lines of code, but fuck....it was awful garbage...so I started writing my own code and unit tests in isolation...and couldn't figure out what the error was. Why was it so fucking slow???? What did I do wrong? I figured I imported an lib by accident or was starting up server threads in the background....nope...it's just a dogshit platform. Really go is total garbage. I have no clue why folks like it. It's run by Google, so you know it will get abandoned. It's slower than Java. It's a lot more complex and hard to use.

If I want something easy to maintain?...I'll go with Java....it'll be faster. If I want better memory usage or speed and don't mind pain in programming...I'll go with Rust...it'll be better in every single way. It's a solution looking for a problem and the worst platform in existence. At least JavaScript and Python make some sense. I hate those fucking languages so much...until I used Go....at least one could argue JavaScript and Python are easier for some users to use. Go has all the downsides of pleasant platforms with none of the advantages. I can't imagine anyone who knows the facts supporting that platform unless Google is paying them.

Not sure the obsession with memory. So long as it is consistent, how much do people care if an instance uses 8GB vs 16? I think most shops would gladly double the RAM for as low as a 10% reduction in response time. If you're writing a text editor?...I can definitely see it, but I think it's safe to say Java has mostly lost that battle, especially with rust on the scene...if you're writing a server-side password manager REST service...I can't imagine most cloud-hosted apps caring about total RAM or startup speed (assuming no leaks and decent RAM usage consistency, of course).

...try their competitors!!!

If you're comparing to Rust?...OK, fair...if you're comparing to Go...oh, that's a painfully slow and disappointing garbage platform...the difficulty of C with the performance of node/Python. Node.js and Python are famously slow and bloated...and C# just really doesn't compete, even before you consider the MS factor.

We are in a new interesting era where platformless choices are becoming an option, like Rust. Go was interesting...until you see the performance...since Java is almost twice as fast...not sure the point. Java is a memory piggy, but I've been working with it for over 25 years, on some platforms that are HUGE and very performance sensitive. It holds up extremely well and scales well and is the most reliable platform I've worked with, by far.

Startup and memory are just not a concern in most business scenarios. No one cares about startup time. Whether it take 1 second or 1 minute to startup...doesn't matter. Thread startup time is also pretty fast, so not sure what you're talking about there...that might be programmer error if it's slower.

Memory usage?...similarly, no server operator cares...RAM is cheap...new instances aren't. It's far cheaper to throw RAM at a platform than cores or machines.

One huge advantage?: Java is predictable and reliable. However it runs for the first week is how it's going to run for it's first decade. I have applications that were started 20 years ago and have most of their code from 10 years ago....running strong, serving millions of users for a highly profitable business....doing real work for real money....upgraded 100s of times...ran in 3 different clouds as well as on-prem. No memory leak issues, great performance (compared to the time the company tried writing services in node.js), just reliability and predictability.

Agreed! In addition, Apple has a BAD history when it comes to software. They have the "reverse-midas-touch" when it comes to software...in that anything they touch turns to shit....look at iTunes as a shining example. They've gotten better in the last decade, but I will wager their legacy app was garbage...probably some old struts app from the early aughts...maybe some EJB 2.1 magic?

What I am interested in, when evaluating platforms, is how much of a performance benefit Swift will provide vs a well-written Java application. Rust definitely provides a tangible benefit...Go, node.js, C#, and Python have significant and noticeably worse performance than Java....both in my direct experience, but also in Amazon's own benchmarks. Swift wasn't in the Amazon study, but I'd like to see how it compares.

If Apple opens up their platform and it truly performs as well as they promise, without significant security concerns, I find it very intriguing. However, if they can't outdo rust, I am not sure what the point is.

Java is quite fast and reasonable in memory usage. It is far superior to it's normal competitors, Go (the slowest disappointment I've ever used), Python, JavaScript, and C#. While C# and Go are better languages than Python & JavaScript, IMHO, Java is the king of those 5 when it comes to response time performance.

Now if you're comparing well-written Java to well-written C++...C++ should have a strong and noticeable advantage. Rust is noticeably faster and lighter as well.

Java's strength is speed and scalability....but it's not lightweight.

But this all depends on what you want to use it for. If you're wanting it for a server-side service? It tends to be the best game in town these days. Rust isn't there TMK and C++ has always had severe security issues....TMK, very few run services in C++ for a variety of reasons...it takes a LOT of skill just to write and minor errors lead to major vulnerabilities you just don't see very often in runtime platforms.

Everyone keeps hyping up AI as a job apocalypse or Terminator/iRobot scenario. Nothing ever demo-ed is close to being able to do anything correctly. There are no signs that the current technology will ever get to the point where it can be trusted to execute tasks correctly.

So...what's it good for?...beyond playing around, it's only good for creating stuff where either a human being is carefully inspecting the output or you just don't care about accuracy or correctness....basically fraud & spam.

I use it daily. I use Claude and ChatGPT daily and have dabbled with CoPilot and Gemini to solve routine business problems in Java. Claude is allegedly the best, but since I use Java and write a lot of unit tests, I can usually instantly tell because it only compiles half the time and it almost always solves the problem incorrectly.

...and I have reasonable expectations. I use the IDE plugins, so it has full access to my code. I give it simple tasks, like "convert this to a lambda" or "write a unit test for this class" or "optimize this class." As mentioned previously, it only compiles half the time. It regularly hallucinates enum values that don't exist. It routinely misforms Strings or doesn't match braces correctly.

Why do I use it?...our directors, like most, think AI will increase productivity, so they mandate that we use it. No one who has touched an IDE in 5 years is a proponent...other than about 2 or 3 AI evangelists and even they admit that it's a "faith based" approach...that they cannot rely on what we have today, but have optimism for the future because they love the idea of AI...just not any AI available today. When you ask them the follow-up question...did you spend more time correcting the mistakes than you would have if you just wrote it by hand?...the answer is always yes...if they know the technology....if they don't?...well, I hope it has a compiler + unit tests or else, how will they know if it's working correctly?

Every moment I use AI, I get more skeptical. The only times I feel hope is when it's been awhile since I last used it. However, what it produces does look correct...it greatly resembles working code. That's where I worry...that we'll get a flood of AI spam and fraud and fake clone websites and it'll get really hard to detect fraud. Today, it's usually easy...mostly due to obvious mistakes the scammers make...ranging from horrible English to broken UIs...but I can picture AI really helping them to scam the newly retired boomers waiting to be fleeced.

While I enjoy thieves getting what they deserve...I worry about them undersecuring this functionality and some hacker turns my iPhone into a remote alarm because I connect to a public WiFi or my kid visits the wrong website.

Sun wouldn't allow you to distribute Java on Linux servers...so everyone low-skilled or undermotivated individuals used PHP instead. Had Sun been smarter about that, EVERY app would be using Java, not just commercial ones. Instead, during the early aughts, we had a divide...those with a budget ran Java, those without or startups who didn't care ran PHP...as well as every web designer or homepage, where they needed a Contact Us form or something small, so they just used their web host default or whatever was distributed or their Linux distro. (not counting the MS users, of course)

Maybe that's a blessing?...the JVM ecosystem would be riddled with even more garbage...but there was definitely a lower path of resistance in using PHP in most environments....not the language (JSP just as beginner friendly and if there was demand, the community would have created something even easier)...and as you know, PHP users migrated to node or Python.

I liked Sun, but that licensing thing was stupid...also having all the encryption in unsupported sun.* packages was also really stupid.

Had OpenJDK been around by 1997, Java would have a MUCH MUCH MUCH larger marketshare.

Java is great. Oracle's licensing fiasco is the greatest blunder in the history of computing. Java should be the undisputed king of business computing, but Oracle and Sun's licensing fuck-uppery strongly hindered what is the industry's superior runtime platform.

Use OpenJDK. It's fully compatible and great and will outperform anything you do in Go, Python, C#, or JavaScript. It sucks that Oracle is engaging in this stupidity...but...eh, the world sucks. Your life doesn't have to...use OpenJDK.

Steamdeck is cool, but the Ally can play XBox and Windows games, including ones from Steam...so 5-15% framerate increase?...that's the benefit of Linux...but how much do you care? It's a 1080p display. Better battery life is cool as well, but for long flights, I have an outlet or many battery packs.

You and I might be different consumers, but I want to play fun games on Games Pass, beat them, and forget they exist. I think many are like me, especially parents. We'd rather give our kids something simple and reliable, with adequate hardware than anything with exquisite hardware.

I wish the steamdeck nothing but success...competition only helps...but I'm paying a lot more close attention to the XBox Ally

Correct. In most ways the legacy environment is much more capable.

Nice! I wish I had had that luxury.