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by mseebach 5733 days ago
Why the downvotes? That's a perfectly reasonable suggestion.

Java is attractive because it's mostly sane, and it's backed by The Enterprise in a big way. Sure, if Google, RedHat, HP and IBM gets behind a fork, it could work - but I can't really see what RH and HP has to gain there. They both need to keep support for Oracle Java to stay relevant. IBMs primary interest in Java is consulting - and the consulting-money going to stay with Oracle Java. Google has a lot of stuff in Java, but they're by no means married to it, except for Android/Dalvik. I'd bet they're more keen to push something like Go (or even Scala for that matter).

But without the enterprise backing, Java is just a pretty dated language. Scala, on the other hand, is a very modern language by most measures, and it will integrate seamlessly with your Java legacy stuff.

Sure, it doesn't solve the problem of depending on the JVM, but if Oracle kills Dalvik, getting a good open source drop-in replacement to the JVM is not going to happen. If not, well, then we have Dalvik :)
1 comments
jaaron 5733 days ago
Depending on the JVM is a bigger issue than you suggest. Without an unencumbered open source JVM, any languages which rely on the JVM will ultimately be dependent on Oracle. Bugs can't get fixed, new platforms can't be ported to, improvements to the VM can't be added.

Jumping to Scala or any other language is just ignoring the more fundamental issues that have always made a proper open source JVM important, regardless of Java's corporate owner.

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