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by kaba0
1129 days ago
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From your Java trap link: “Since this article was first published, Sun (now part of Oracle) has relicensed most of its Java platform reference implementation under the GNU General Public License, and there is now a free development environment for Java. Thus, the Java language as such is no longer a trap.
You must be careful, however, because not every Java platform is free. Sun continues distributing an executable Java platform which is nonfree, and other companies do so too” Also, Stallman is quite an “extremist” and he is often himself the enemy of open-source by his gatekeeping, so there is that. Re the GUIs: I think it says a bit also about the state of GUIs on linux, then the reverse - and I say that as someone who has been using linux on every computer I own since forever. You made some great points, but I think the real reason is even simpler, old graybeard linux users are very conservative in their technology takes. The overabundance of C software (and the unavoidable memory vulnerabilities that come with that) even at places where it makes zero sense is clear sign of that, but so are the “systems/pulse/wayland hater fangroups”. |
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People who don't care about Stallman's zealotry do still care about that and it presented a similar lasting problem to Java's Linux uptake as the problem D had more broadly with two competing and mutually incompatible standard libraries (Phobos and Tango) in the early years.
As for the GUIs, I listed three different ways unique to Java that Java GUIs were subpar on Linux:
1. Needing weird workarounds for applications to not display blank grey windows on non-reparenting window managers. (Basically, if the WM was something like a tiling WM that didn't reparent it from the root window to a WM-provided "titlebar and borders" parent window, the app would refuse to render anything without enabling the relevant hack.)
2. Caring so little about solving known bugs that slipped through QA that, for a shamefully long window of time, users with more than one monitor literally had to hex-edit their JVM to intentionally no-op the XINERAMA detection to make applications work. (i.e. XINERAMA being the X11 extension that allows Windows/Mac-style "one desktop stretched across multiple monitors" multi-head instead of the older "Behaves like a software KVM and applications are trapped on the monitors they opened on" Zaphod mode.)
3. Having some kind of input-response latency that I've never seen in another language or toolkit, which is apparently caused by something so fundamentally Java that it's present in every Java toolkit I've checked.
As far as greybeards go, I think we'd need more data points. Eric S. Raymond is quite an old-guard guy and even had some "jumps to conclusions"-y, "it's not enough like C"-ish reasons for choosing Go over Rust (eg. No `select` as part of the standard library, ignoring how Rust intentionally keeps the standard library minimal), but had no problem with using Python where it was suitable, while he didn't like Java because it was was more of the ChromeOS or Android school of doing stuff on top of a POSIX base.