Comment by bluedino
5 years ago
I always tell a story about an application we ran, it generated its own interface based on whatever was in inventory. Someone did something really stupid and duplicated each inventory item for each main unit we sold...so you had recursive mess. Assigning 100,000 items when previously it was 100-ish
Anyway, everyone just rolled their eyes and blamed the fact that the app was written in Java.
It ended up generating an XML file during that minute long startup....so we just saved the file to the network and loaded it on startup. If inventory changed, we’d re-generate the file once and be done with it.
It's a lot easier to blame an language for being slow because it's obvious. Blaming algorithms requiresputying in the time to figure things out.
There’s also a confound between a language and its communities. I’ve seen so many cases where a “slow” language like Python or (older) Perl smoked Java or C++ because the latter developers were trying to follow cultural norms which said that Real Decelopers™ don’t write simple code and they had huge memory churn with dense object hierarchies and indirection so performance ended up being limited by O(n) XML property lookups for a config setting which nobody had ever changed whereas the “slow” language developer had just implemented a simple algorithm directly and most of the runtime was in highly-optimized stdlib native code, a fast regex instead of a naive textbook parser which devolved into an object churn benchmark, etc.
Languages like Java get a lot of bad reputation for that because of popularity: not just that many people are hired into broken-by-design environments (or ones where they’re using some framework from a big consultancy or a vendor who makes most of their revenue from consulting services) but also because many people learn the language as their first language and often are deeply influenced by framework code without realizing the difference between widely used long-term reusable code and what most projects actually need and are staffed for. It’s easy to see the style of the Java standard frameworks or one of the major Apache projects and think that everyone is supposed to write code like that, forgetting that they have to support a greater number of far more diverse projects over a longer timeframe than your in-house business app nobody else works on. Broader experience helps moderate this but many places choose poor metrics and neglect career development.
> devolved into an object churn benchmark
I'm stealing this phrase.
Java is RAM guzzler with some a small inability to optimize with value types. In its class (managed programming language without value types) it is pretty much as fast as it gets.
The two performance flaws that exist are:
1. Old Java frameworks were not written with performance in mind
2. Your entire app is written in Java so you don't benefit from C++ libraries