Posted by philonoist 13 hours ago
> In 1995, a memory access cost roughly the same as a CPU operation
Uhm... no?!
Here's a CS paper from 1993(!) about prefetching from cache(!!) because the cache was slower than the ALU. https://www.eecs.umich.edu/techreports/cse/93/CSE-TR-152-93....
It would perhaps make Java look a little bad to say that, in 1995, the prevailing attitude in certain circles was "If it's too slow, just wait for faster hardware - Moore's Law forever baby!" (Of course, Sun was selling, at the time, relatively fast hardware - the slower the software, the faster the required hardware)
The Z80 took 3 cycles to load from memory. A register to register transfer took 4 cycles (including fetching the instruction). Only one of those cycles was instruction execution.
I think the only reasonably mainstream scenario where the CPU would be significantly slower than memory would be the serial CPU designs such as the PDP-8/s.
That said, at the time people were doing cool stuff with 8-bit CPUs, they weren't running software remotely like what we're discussing here. That would have been done on a VAX, which had instruction and data caches.
What really happened, that the article is alluding to is that memory didn't get much faster in absolute terms since the 1980s. CPUs on the other hand did.
E.g. in the 1980s we had 60ns DRAM. Today DDR5 I believe allows about 10ns random access reads best case (6X). Over the same period CPU clock speeds have increased from about 8MHz to 5GHz (600X).
Java is generally backwards compatible, so unless you're using fat frameworks that use shady internals or known-deprecated APIs, you should generally be fine immediately upgrading to the latest LTS, possibly even non-LTS versions if you have confidence in your stack.
Mostly just hit the LTSes is what we've been doing and since about 17 it's been a pretty easy process in general.
Protip: If you ditch lombok everything gets a lot easier.
if you really want a fun drawing get a human artist to do it. it doesn't need to be complicated, for example https://www.code-cartoons.com/ is mostly just stick figures and does an excellent job
but you don't even need any of that, a mermaid diagram would have worked perfectly fine too. instead you chose to use a technology that is known to be harmful
If you don't have the time or put in the effort to make your article, I'm not going to spend time and effort reading it. You really don't need some generic cartoon guy hovering over your graphs, draw them in MS paint or something.
And that across 2819 commits.
Wow, that’s insane.
That seems off. They're still objects, the new thing is that they can give up identity.
Let's take a stroll down memory lane. First of all, .NET literally started as a Java copy. On top of it, a non-cross-platform one for almost two decades! After having shamed Linux for so long Microsoft finally started porting .NET to other platforms in a non-backward compatible way. A lot of .NET proponents will tell you porting from legacy .NET to .NET Core (which was renamed once again to .NET) would be a quick fix, but it isn't. For example, the shop I used to work in had some important cryptographic libraries which were very painful to port. And then, there's .NET's simplistic garbage collector, which can be quite annoying because it tries to be a one-fit-all solution that basically cannot be tweaked at all, often resulting in unresolvable latency problems. There’s a lot of other stuff, like its ghetto-like ecosystem and the insane fragmentation of GUI libraries.
I also don't get the C# praise. Over the years, it has become quite the bloated language. It feels like Microsoft tries to implement every feature possible without realizing that an enterprise language is supposed to be streamlined. Async/await? Very ugly, very annoying. Java has solved this a lot better with virtual threads and structured concurrency.
I could go on, but these "language wars" are silly and pointless. Both platforms have their pros and cons. Besides, I have a lot of bad things to say about the JVM as well, but it's nice to see Valhalla finally beocming reality. Too late for me personally though.
Like what?
legacy .NET to .NET Core (which was renamed once again to .NET)
here's .NET's simplistic garbage collector ... it tries to be a one-fit-all solution that basically cannot be tweaked at all