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Comment by noisy_boy

3 months ago

If I have all the time in the world, sure. When I'm racing against a deadline, I don't want to wrestle with the borrow checker too. Sure, it's objections help with the long term quality of the code and reduce bugs but that's hard to justify to a manager/process driven by Agile and Sprints. Quite possible that an experienced Rust dev can be very productive but there aren't tons of those going around.

Java has the stigma of ClassFactoryGeneratorFactory sticking to it like a nasty smell but that's not how the language makes you write things. I write Java professionally and it is as readable as any other language. You can write clean, straightforward and easy to reason code without much friction. It's a great general purpose language.

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noisy_boy

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willtemperley  3 months ago

Java is incredibly productive - it's fast and has the best tooling out there IMO.

Unfortunately it's not a good gaming language. GC pauses aren't really acceptable (which C# also suffers from) and GPU support is limited.

Miguel de Icaza probably has more experience than anyone building game engines on GC platforms and is very vocally moving toward reference counted languages [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzt36EGKEZo

  • nayuki  3 months ago

    > GC pauses aren't really acceptable

    Java has made great progress with low-pause (~1 ms) garbage collectors like ZGC and Shenandoah since ~5 years ago.

    • BigJono  3 months ago

      People have 240hz monitors these days, you have a bit over 4ms to render a frame. If that 1ms can be eliminated or amortised over a few frames it's still a big deal, and that's assuming 1ms is the worst case scenario and not the best.

      3 replies →

    • willtemperley  3 months ago

      Yes and it's impressive.

      For the competitive Minecraft player, I suspect starting their VM with XX:+UnlockExperimentalVMOptions is normal.

      A casual gamer is however not going to enjoy that.

      2 replies →

im3w1l  3 months ago

I have found that the ClassFactoryGeneratorFactories sneak up on you. Even if you don't want to the ecosystem slowly but surely nudges you that way.

  • noisy_boy  3 months ago

    That has not been my experience. Sure, you don't have any control over the third-party stuff but I haven't seen this issue being widespread in the mainstream third-party libraries I've used e.g. logback, jackson, junit, jedis, pgJDBC etc which are very well known/widely used. The only place I've actually seen proliferation of this was by a contractor, who I suspect, was trying to ensure job security behind impenetrability.