[01HNNWZ0MV43FF]

Yeah that's kind of a crummy tradeoff.

Docker is "Runs on any Linux, mostly, if you have a new enough kernel" meaning it packages a big VM anyway for Windows and macOS

VMs are "Runs on anything! ... Sorta, mostly, if you have VM acceleration" meaning you have to pick a VM software and hope the VM doesn't crash for no reason. (I have real bad luck with UTM and VirtualBox on my Macbook host for some reason.)

All I want is everything - An APE-like program that runs on any OS, maybe has shims for slightly-old kernels, doesn't need a big installation step, and runs any useful guest OS. (i.e. Linux)

[compsciphd]

docker is your userspace program carries all its user space dependencies with it and doesn't depend on the userspace configuration of the underlying system.

What I argued in my paper is that systems like docker (i.e. what I created before it), improve over VMs and (even Zones/ZFS) in their ability to really run ephemeral computation. i.e. if it takes microseconds to setup the container file system, you can run a boatload of heterogeneous containers even if they only needed to run for very shot periods of time). Solaris Zones/ZFS didn't lend itself to heterogeneous environments, but simply cloning as single homogeneous environment, while VMs suffered from that problem, they also (at least at the time, much improved as of late) required a reasonably long bootup time.

[neaanopri]

The modern developer yearns for Java

[smallmancontrov]

I had to use eclipse the other day. How the hell is it just as slow and clunky as I remember from 20 years ago? Does it exist in a pocket dimension where Moore's Law doesn't apply?

[marcosdumay]

It's not as slow as it was 20 years ago.

It's only as slow as you remember because the actual performance was so bad that you can't physiologically remember it.

[TurningCanadian]

That's not Java's fault though. IntelliJ IDEA is also built on Java and runs just fine.

[qwery]

I think it's pretty remarkable to see any application in continuous use for so long, especially with so few changes[0] -- Eclipse must be doing something right!

Maintaining (if not actively improving/developing) a piece of useful software without performance degradation -- that's a win.

Keeping that up for decades? That's exceptional.

[0] "so few changes": I'm not commenting on the amount of work done on the project or claiming that there is no useful/visible features added or upgrades, but referring to Eclipse of today feeling like the same application as it always did, and that Eclipse hasn't had multiple alarmingly frequent "reboots", "overhauls", etc.

[?] keeping performance constant over the last decade or two is a win, relatively speaking, anyway

[dijit]

I agree, that you've pointed it out to me makes it obvious that this is not the norm, and we should celebrate this.

I'm reminded of Casey Muratori's rant on Visual Studio; a program that largely feels like it hasn't changed much but clearly has regressed in performance massively; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC-0tCy4P1U

[password4321]

> without performance degradation

Not accounting for Moore's Law, yikes. Need a comparison adjusted for "today's dollars".

[mschuster91]

Java's ecosystem is just as bad. Gradle is insanely flexible but people create abominations out of it, Maven is extremely rigid so people resort to even worse abominations to get basic shit done.

[gryfft]

Maybe just the JVM.

[klooney]

> Runs on any Linux, mostly, if you have a new enough kernel"

New enough kernel means CentOS 5 is right out. But it's been a decade, it'll run on anything vaguely sensible to be running today

[01HNNWZ0MV43FF]

Maybe I'm just grumpy that once you line up the support windows, it's impossible to get new software on old hardware, even though the "oomph" is there

Maybe my next big hobby project should be emulating bleeding-edge Linux on some old 686 hardware. Like that guy who booted Ubuntu on an 8-bit AVR in a matter of mere days