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by lmm 1868 days ago
Huh? Java is probably the least demanding stack from the sysadmin side - no big chains of library dependencies, no docker, strong backwards compatibility that means you can fearlessly upgrade the language. All you have to do is keep an up-to-date JVM installed on your servers and deploy single-file fat JARs to them.
2 comments
smitty1e 1868 days ago
Then you get into managing a collection of Java projects where each on ships its own JVM and keystore to obviate version issues.

And then you have to deploy certificates against all that.

I'm not bitter.

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twic 1868 days ago
The keystore situation is indeed poor. For several years now, it has been possible to do more key management in-app, so you don't need to manage keystores (i have written programs which pull standard PEM-encoded keys from environment variables). But the practice of using a JKS keystore is so ingrained that it's very rare to make use of that.
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lovasoa 1868 days ago
Until you get an out of memory error. Then you need to start fiddling with the JVM.

Or until you realize that you have a 99th percentile latency of multiple seconds...

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lmm 1868 days ago
No language is immune to slow or memory-hungry code. The JVM is probably the easiest runtime to monitor/instrument/profile (and it's not like having no runtime makes that any easier, quite the opposite), and has probably the most tuneable GC going.

I guess enabling your users to do that might be work for a sysadmin, but that's more a reflection of those users having higher expectations for Java than for other runtimes - providing your users with the same capability in other stacks is never easier than Java, and often significantly harder.

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oblio 1868 days ago
There are only a bunch of out of memory errors, though. And they're easy to fix.
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