You're not wrong, it's still a staple today, but it lost a lot of its shine a while ago. They are mimicking "new" features introduced in other languages, but make a point to preserve retrocompatibility.

I can't imagine how convoluted the JVM has become in the last 10 years.

[–] abbadon420@lemm.ee 35 points 7 months ago (2 children)

I don't really see how that is bad..? Java wants to be widely applicable and taking the best features from other languages helps that goal, right?

[–] jaybone@lemmy.world 23 points 7 months ago (1 children)

C++ fanboys will talk a bunch of shit about Java for this, but c++ has been doing this same shit (and more poorly) pretty much since its inception.

And most of the newer Java stuff is syntactic sugar, so I’m not sure why that commenter is calling out JVM implementations. I’m guessing they don’t know much about the JVM, since you can compile these higher level syntax tricks down into bytecode just like you might compile more verbose source code.

Static analysis of compiled code with javap might be more difficult, but I’m betting the commenter doesn’t know what that is either.

[–] nik9000@programming.dev 1 points 7 months ago

I think the last new instruction the JVM added was invokedynamic like 10 years ago. I believe they did it so lambdas could be called efficiently. Polymorphic incline cache and stuff.

But the JVM has grown more complex in other ways. The way to force simd instructions is pretty wild, for example.

I don't know enough to call it a mess or not. It works though.

[–] masterspace@lemmy.ca 5 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Because Java sucks at taking those features. I mean look at Java's Optional abomination of a class and compare it to C# or Typescript's optional chaining ( ?. ) language feature.

There's a reason Kotlin was created, because Java is still bogged down by all its legacy kruft.

[–] QuaternionsRock@lemmy.world 3 points 7 months ago

It still boggles my mind that C# is as good as it is given where it comes from. Java really fucked up with type erasure and never fully recovered imo.