Comment by jmyeet
4 hours ago
Wasn't it Joel Spolsky who said every option is a cop out? Or maybe Steve Yegge? I forget. It's something I agree with. I often have this thought when going through the options of something conceptually fairly simple: "who is this for? who actually uses this option?"
I kinda feel the same way with C/C++ warnings. Different code bases decide if different warnings are errors. That was a mistake (IMHO).
The other thought I have scanning these options is how many are related to GC. I kinda think GC is a bit of a false economy. It's just hiding the complexity. I wonder if it would've been better to push GC to be pluggable rather than relying on a host of options, a bit like TCP congestion management. I mean there are /proc parameters for that in Linux, for example, but it's also segregated (eg using BRR).
At the end of the day, none of this really matters. As in, the JVM is mature and I think generally respected.
The GC is pluggable, that’s why you have so many to choose from depending on your work load. You rarely if ever have to touch those options. In the last 10 years all of my apps, since I run on a modern version of Java, only ever set max heap size and soon that will (finally) be figured out automatically: https://openjdk.org/jeps/8359211
Joe Spolsky also never created anything as popular and widely deployed as Java. It's easy to bloviate about pure software when it doesn't need to literally run the whole world as you know it.