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by marginalia_nu 803 days ago
The short story is I'm productive in Java, and I enjoy its mature ecosystem and stable APIs. Systems programming is awkward, but it's also a very small part of the project and for what it is, an interesting challenge.

What I'm building is what Lucene does (i.e. document indexing) and then the rest of the search engine as well including crawling and serving traffic.
2 comments
int_19h 802 days ago
Have you tried C# for those kinds of things? It's normally the same level of abstraction as Java, and has similarly mature ecosystem with stable APIs, but it also has unsigned types, unmanaged data and function pointers (with pointer arithmetic), unions, the equivalent of alloca etc for when you need to go low-level.
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YoshiRulz 803 days ago
Have you ever tried Kotlin? For non-system-level stuff on the JVM, it's IMO a direct upgrade to Java. `value class` for type aliases, `when`, and better null handling. But then, modern Java is doing all that stuff too, I hear.
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