Comment by bigstrat2003
6 months ago
Java has had shit backwards compatibility for as long as I have had to deal with it. Maybe it's better now, but I have not forgotten the days of "you have to use exactly Java 1.4.15 or this app won't work"... with four different apps that each need their own different version of the JRE or they break. The only thing that finally made Java apps tolerable to support was the rise of app virtualization solutions. Before that, it was a nightmare and Java was justly known as "the devil's software" to everyone who had to support it.
That was probably 1.4.2_15, because 1.4.15 did not exist. What you describe wasn’t a Java source or binary compatibility problem, it was a shipping problem and it did exist in C++ world too (and still exists - sharing runtime dependencies is hard). I remember those days too. Java 5 was released 20 years ago, so you describe some really ancient stuff.
Today we don’t have those limits on HDD space and can simply ship an embedded copy of JRE with the desktop app. In server environments I doubt anyone is reusing JRE between apps at all.
While "Well, just bundle in a copy of the whole-ass JRE" makes packaging Java software easier, it's still true that Java's backwards-compatibility is often really bad.
> ...sharing runtime dependencies [in C or C++] is hard...
Is it? The "foo.so foo.1.so foo.1.2.3.so" mechanism works really well, for libraries whose devs that are capable of failing to ship backwards-incompatible changes in patch versions, and ABI-breaking changes in minor versions.
> Java's backwards-compatibility is often really bad.
“Often” is a huge exaggeration. I always hear about it, but never encountered it myself in 25 years of commercial Java development. It almost feels like some people are doing weird stuff and then blame the technology.
> Is it? The "foo.so foo.1.so foo.1.2.3.so"
Is it “sharing” or having every version of runtime used by at least one app?
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