I installed it on a laptop for a friend after not having used it since the mid 2000’s. What a piece of flaming dogshit that whole platform is. How is this the output of a multi billion dollar company?
Well then you look at a random webpage from CNN and I guess they’re all competing for how trashy they can make their products.
There can’t be any pride left at all in that place.
I spent a couple weeks trying to bolt this on to our setup to support a more serverless style approach. OpenJ9 (sadly) really didn't work out well, perhaps we run in a way they don't optimize for. Azul and OpenJDK's approaches helped - but it is quite intrusive (you need a profiling run), and the absolute benefits aren't that great. It's mostly doing classpath stuff at present, and not really AOT work on machine code (though that is in the pipeline).
All in all, I wasn't particularly impressed with the outcome. Obviously GraalVM has more headroom, but that's an even more intrusive change.
When compared with a Rust port of our service, the delta of the efforts is absolutely astronomical. Ridiculous performance, near-instant startup, radically less memory consumption. I mean - duh - but nonetheless, when I contrast the effort vs payback, it's very hard for me to want to invest so much in techniques that have so little payback (graal) when I can put that into an approach that leaves me in a much better place long-term.
If I had mountains of legacy, obviously I couldn't do that, but in my situation it seems like a much more attractive option.
Are you arguing it's less work to rewrite your entire app in Rust than to use GraalVM Native Image? Because you can get C/Rust style startup time and less memory usage with the latter, but it should take an agent only a few minutes to get things working (unless you are using a lot libraries that spin bytecode, but there is a mode for native image coming that can fully handle bytecode generation and can run any Java app).
> Ridiculous performance, near-instant startup, radically less memory consumption.
It seems like your use case is rather not a good fit for Java.
Java shines best with large applications, where more abstract source code is desired and when you care more about typical performance, not the worst case performance. And if you can afford the cost of all those benefits, which is higher RAM usage.
It's not like typical performance of Java is great and only GC pauses (or whatever) drag it down. In other words, Java is no match for Rust / C / C++ even comparing "good runs only" of both.
There are no GC pauses in modern Java implementations, and there are plenty of systems written in C and C++ that have been replaced by Java, I took part in such projects.
Companies like PTC and Aicas stay in business, because there are plenty of industries that pay for their embedded JVM implementations instead of keeping legacy C and C++ infrastructure running.
I'm arguing against "Java performance is as good as it gets" in this thread, but the best Java GCs have sub-millisecond pause times for huge heap sizes and, apparently, such a GC even became the default recent-ish-ly: https://inside.java/2023/11/28/gen-zgc-explainer/
The JVM is amazing technology for what it is, but what it is still limits how fast it can go.
They were early movers and established a lot of the patterns in the space, but I just don't see them holding on to this lead. Spark/Hadoop is really so damn inefficient that something like DuckDB shows where that overhead is, and it's extreme in many cases.
What I don't understand is why they didn't build this project on top of DuckLake instead - from my shallow analysis they vibe coded up a fake Databricks in Python.
Not that I'd use it, I want to avoid Databricks - the Duck ecosystem is far more compelling for my modest needs, and handles local develop a lot better (IMO).
The issue is there are SO MANY people who stop at the conclusion "batteries are expensive, dirty, use rare materials and are fueled by slave labour" - this level of understanding is ubiquitous in my experience. What I never hear is "compared to what" - like how does the full lifecycle analysis of those batteries IN CONTEXT compare to the status quo?
Or the folks that extend that argument to "EVs are bad". Without even considering the energy mix that they rely on. If you're not even interested in doing a single ounce of research and thinking, you're not making a point - you're regurgitating corporate propaganda.
I have to suspect that there are so many because there has been a propaganda campaign against progress, I suspect as a branch of the fossil fuel PR to say that climate change is not real, what we are doing now is fine and we shouldn’t change anything.
We did this many years ago for remote First Nations sites with an energy monitoring startup I worked for - saving them enormous sums of money (and carbon!) in the process. It's actually quite amazing how low some of the low hanging fruit is once you start looking.
That is really cool, our use case was powering an off-grid festival in a remote location. Our battery fit in a semi-truck (so it was fairly big, but not grid-scale). I don't remember the exact savings on fuel but it was ridiculous, like truly non-sense why doesn't everyone do it like that. I think the generator was on only about 40% of the time.
Even as backup power it still makes sense to have a battery attached because it extends the capacity of the system so much. The main problem is that you need some BMS software to coordinate the generator and the battery, but there aren't self contained solutions like this widely available (at least last I worked with it).
When did it become "alive"? GPT-3? What is the threshold at which we consider something to be living. Is this a matter of complexity alone?
How alive is a collection of a dozen transistors? A million, billion, trillion? We can't just claim something is alive without being very specific about _why_ we believe it to be alive. The article's suggestion doesn't even begin to mention that.
Likewise, at what threshold do neurons become a brain capable of supporting a conscious mind? There is no threshold, thus there is no difference between the two; therefore we are not conscious.
Well then you look at a random webpage from CNN and I guess they’re all competing for how trashy they can make their products.
There can’t be any pride left at all in that place.
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