[gwbas1c]

Oh no, I'm directly criticizing C/C++/Java/C#:

The heavyweight framework (and startup cost) that comes with Java and C# makes them challenging for widely-adopted lightweight command-line tools. (Although I love C# as a language, I find the Rust toolchain much simpler and easier to work with than modern dotnet.)

Building C (and C++) is often a nightmare.

[hypeatei]

> The heavyweight framework

Do you mean the VM/runtime? If so, you might be able to eliminate that with an AOT build.

> I find the Rust toolchain much simpler and easier to work with than modern dotnet

What part of the toolchain? I find them pretty similar with the only difference being the way you install them (with dotnet coming from a distro package and Rust from rustup)

[jillesvangurp]

Exactly, natively compiled garbage collected languages (like Java with Graal; or as executed on Android) don't have a lot of startup overhead. In Java the startup overhead is mostly two things that usually conspire to make things worse:

1) dynamic loading of jar files

2) reflection

Number 1 allows you to load arbitrary jar files with code and execute them. Number 2 allows you to programmatically introspect existing code and then execute logic like "Find me all Foo sub classes and create an instance of those and return the list of those objects". You can do that at any time but a lot of that kind of stuff happens at startup. That involves parsing, loading and introspecting thousands of class files in jar files that need to be opened and decompressed.

Most of "Java is slow" is basically programs loading a lot of stuff at startup, and then using reflection to look for code to execute. You don't have to do those things. But a lot of popular web frameworks like Spring do. A lot of that stuff is actually remarkably quick considering what it is doing. You'd struggle to do this in many other languages. Or at all because many languages don't have reflection. If you profile it, there are millions of calls happening in the first couple of seconds. It's taking time yes. But that code has also been heavily optimized over the years. Dismissing what that does as "java is slow" and X is fast is usually a bit of an apples and oranges discussion.

With Spring Boot, there are dozens of libraries that self initialize if you simply add the dependency or the right configuration to your project. We can argue about whether that's nice or not; I'm leaning to no. But it's a neat feature. I'm more into lighter weight frameworks these days. Ktor server is pretty nice, for example. It starts pretty quickly because it doesn't do a whole lot on startup.

Loading a tiny garbage collector library on startup isn't a big deal. It will add a few microseconds to your startup time maybe. Probably not milliseconds. Kotlin has a nice native compiler. If you compile hello world with it it's a few hundred kilobytes for a self contained binary with the program, runtime, and the garbage collection. It's not a great garbage collector. For memory intensive stuff you are better off using the JVM. But if that's not a concern, it will do the job.

[mk89]

You forgot to mention Quarkus :)

[ComputerGuru]

New AOT C# is nice, but not fully doable with the most common dependencies. It addresses a lot of the old issues (size, bloat, startup latency, etc)

[jiggawatts]

Hilariously, the Microsoft SQL Client is the primary blocker for AOT for most potential usecases.

Want fast startup for an Azure Function talking to Azure SQL Database? Hah… no.

In all seriousness, that one dependency is the chain around the ankle of modern .NET because it’s not even fully async capable! It’s had critical performance regression bugs open for years.

Microsoft’s best engineers are busy partying in the AI pool and forgot about drudgery like “make the basics components work”.

[procaryote]

Hello world in java is pretty fast. Not rust fast but a lot faster than you'd expect.

Java starting slowly is mostly from all the cruft in the typical java app, with springboot, dependency injection frameworks, registries etc. You don't have to have those, it's just that most java devs use them and can't conceive of a world of low dependencies

Still not great for commandline apps, but java itself is much better than java devs

[gizmo686]

Testing on my machine, Hello World in java (openjdk 21) takes about 30ms.

In contrast, "time" reports that rust takes 1ms, which is the limit of it's precision.

Python does Hello World in just 8ms, despite not having a separate AOT compilation step.

The general guidance I've seen for interaction is that things start to feel laggy at 100ms; so 30ms isn't a dealbreaker, but throwing a third of your time budget at the baseline runtime cost is a pretty steep ask.

If you want to use the application as a short lived component in a larger system, than 30ms on every invocation can be a massive cost.

[zigzag312]

App that actually does something will probably have even larger startup overhead in Java as there will be more to compile just-in-time.

[pjmlp]

Only when not using either AOT or JIT cache.

[0cf8612b2e1e]

I recall that Mercurial was really fighting their Python test harness. It essentially would startup a new Python process for each test. At 10ms per, it added up to something significant, given their volume of work to cover something as complicated as SCM.

[typpilol]

10ms?

Did they have like 100k tests?

[0cf8612b2e1e]

Found a 2014 thread where 10-18% of the test harness time was spent booting the interpreter for the 13,000 required instances. The deeper thread was showing some 500-700 seconds of test time was just the interpreter overhead. The original point of the article was how much worse the overhead was in Python3 vs Python2.

https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2014-May/134528...

[typpilol]

That's a lot more extreme than 10ms and yea I get your point better now

[guelo]

I'm trying and failing to imagine a situation where 30ms startup time would be a problem. Maybe some kind of network service that needs to execute a separate process on every request?

[davemp]

30ms is pretty close to noticeable for anything that responds to user input. 30ms startup + 20-70ms processing would probably bump you into the noticeable latency range.

[yeasku]

People play midi keyboards with 30 ms latency.

[davemp]

Yeah I don’t think 30ms is very noticeable, but say you have a cli tool with other 20-70ms to bump you up to 50-100ms your tool will have noticeable latency. Death by a thousand cuts.

[tacticus]

30ms is the absolute best case. Throw some spring in there and you're very quickly at 10s. rub some spring-soap and it's near enough to 60s

[ori_b]

And imagine if you start adding sleep calls! Those could take minutes to hours, or even days!

[ykonstant]

New HN submission: How I Made My Sleep Function Accidentally Quadratic.

[pixelpoet]

It's not about how long someone is willing to wait with a timer and judge it on human timescales, it's about what is an appropriate length of time for the task.

30ms for a program to start, print hello world, and terminate on a modern computer is batshit insane, and it's crazy how many programmers have completely lost sight of even the principle of this.

[yeasku]

Java is a tool, a very good one.

[kbolino]

Java's biggest weakness in this area is its lack of value types. It's well known, Project Valhalla has been trying to fix it for years, but the JVM just wasn't built around such types and it's hard to bolt them on after the fact. Java's next biggest weakness (which will become more evident with value types) is its type-erased generics. Both of these problems lead to time wasted on unnecessary GC, and though they can be worked around with arrays and codegen, it's unwieldy to say the least.

[pron]

Project Valhalla will also specialise generics for value types. When you say, "it's hard to bolt on", the challenge isn't technical, but how to do this in a way that adds minimal language complexity (i.e. less than in other languages with explicit "boxed" and "inlined" values). Ideally, this should be done in a way that tells the compiler know which types can be inlined (e.g. they don't require identity) and then letting the compiler decide when it wants to actually inline an instance as a transparent optimisation. The challenge would not have been any smaller had Java done this from the beginning.

[kbolino]

Maybe I picked the wrong wording--I don't mean to diminish the ambitions or scope of Valhalla--but I definitely think the decision to eschew value types at the start has immense bearing on the difficulty of adding them now.

Java's major competitors, C# and Go, both have had value types since day one and reified generics since they gained generics; this hasn't posed any major problems to either language (with the former being IMO already more complex than Java, but the latter being similarly or even less complex than Java).

If the technical side isn't that hard, I'd have expected the JVM to have implemented value types already, making it available to other less conservative languages like Kotlin, while work on smoothly integrating it in Java took as long as needed. Project Valhalla is over a decade old, and it still hasn't delivered, or even seems close to delivering, its primary goals yet.

Just to be clear, I don't think every language needs to meet every need. The lack of value types is not a critical flaw of Java in general, as it only really matters when trying to use Java for certain purposes. After all, C# is very well suited to this niche; Java doesn't have to fit in it too.

[pron]

> Java's major competitors, C# and Go, both have had value types since day one

Yes (well, structs; not really value types), but at a significant cost to FFI and/or GC and/or user-mode threads (due to pointers into the stack and/or middle of objects). Java would not have implemented value types in this way, and doing it the way we want to would have been equally tricky had it been done in Java 1.0. Reified generics also come at a high price, that of baking the language's variance strategy into the ABI (or VM, if you want). However, value types will be invariant (or possibly extensible in some different way), so it would be possible to specialise generics for them without necessarily baking the Java language's variance model into the JVM (as the C# variance model is baked into the CLR).

Also, C# and Go didn't have as much of a choice, as their optimising compilers and GCs aren't as sophisticated as Java's (e.g. Java doesn't actually allocate every `new` object on the heap). Java has long tried to keep the language as simple as possible, and have very advanced compilers and GCs.

> If the technical side isn't that hard, I'd have expected the JVM to have implemented value types already, making it available to other less conservative languages like Kotlin, while work on smoothly integrating it in Java took as long as needed

First, that's not how we do things. Users of all alternative Java Platform languages (aka alternative JVM languages) combined make up less than 10% of all Java platform users. We work on the language, VM, and standard library all together (this isn't the approach taken by .NET, BTW). We did deliver invokedynamic before it was used by the Java language, but 1. that was after we knew how the language would use it, and 2. that was at a time when the JDK's release model was much less flexible.

Second, even if we wanted to work in this way, it wouldn't have mattered here. Other Java Platform languages don't just use the JVM. They make extensive use of the standard library and observability tooling. Until those are modified to account for value types, just a JVM change would be of little use to those languages. The JVM comprises maybe 25% of the JDK, while Kotlin, for example, makes use of over 95% of the JDK.

Anyway, Project Valhalla has taken a very long time, but it's making good progress, and we hope to deliver some of its pieces soon enough.

[pjmlp]

Go I agree, .NET is on par with JVM, even if they don't have the pleothora of choice regarding JVM implementations, and the ability to do C++ like coding means there isn't that much of a pressure for pauseless GC as in Java.

Looking forward to Project Valhalla updates, I had some fun with the first EA.

[kbolino]

This has been a very informative discussion, so thank you for that.

I did want to point out, though, that both languages have other (compound) value types than just structs. Go has value-based arrays, and C# has value-based tuples. It looks like C# may gain value-based discriminated unions as well, though it's not settled yet: https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/blob/main/proposals/uni...

[pjmlp]

Currently it takes lots of boilerplate code, however with Project Panama API you can model C types in memory, thus kind of already using value types even if Valhala isn't yet here.

To avoid manually writing all the Panama boilerplate, you can instead write a C header file with the desired types, and then run jextract through it.

[pjmlp]

Only for those that don't know how to use AOT compilation tools for Java and C#.

[paulddraper]

Compiling Java AOT doesn’t obviate the need for the JVM.

At least not for Graal.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/75316542/why-do-i-need-j...

[pjmlp]

Because it is user problem, instead of compiling with native image, they produced a shared library out of the Jar.

As you can see, it has nothing to do with that Stack Overflow question,

https://www.graalvm.org/jdk25/reference-manual/native-image/

[gudzpoz]

... That post you linked was from two years ago, discussing JEP 295, which was delivered eight years ago. Graal-based AOT has evolved a lot ever since. And the answer even explicitly recommended using native images:

> I think what you actually want to do, is to compile a native image of your program. This would include all the implications like garbage collection from the JVM into the executable.

And it is this "native image" that all the comments above in this thread have been discussing, not JEP 295. (And Graal-based AOT in native images does remove the need to bundle a whole JRE.)

[jraph]

GraalVM indeed do wonders wrt startup times and in providing a single binary you can call.

[pjmlp]

Open J9 as well.

Then there are all the others that used to be commercial like ExcelsiorJET, or surviving ones like PTC and Aicas.

[quotemstr]

Heavyweight startup? What are you talking about? A Graal-compiled Java binary starts in a few milliseconds. Great example of how people don't update prejudices for decades.