alt Hacker NewsI use Java every day but just to point out that your info about Go‘s GC seems out of date. They switched to Green Tea in 1.25 (I think?) - new GC that even has AVX-512 optimizations. Not sure what you mean by basic about the compiler but it‘s very fast and supports a large set of platforms. That‘s not basic to me.
We are using JDK25 and are considering rewriting parts of our product to Go because of lower memory pressure and faster startup time, i.e., cloud friendly. I actually love both languages.
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Go's compiler is fast because it doesn't do as many advanced (read: computationally expensive) optimizations as other compilers do. No clue about Green Tea and how awesome it is :-).
Lower memory pressure is certainly a difficult thing to beat Go at, Java (OpenJDK) is probably never gonna get there. You get a lot of other stuff, like better peak performance, instead.
Btw, have you tried Leyden/AOT for better startup times? Curious about your experiences with that.
> I use Java every day but just to point out that your info about Go‘s GC seems out of date.
I'm well aware that Go's GC has improved, but the moving algorithm was designed not just to be fast for a GC, but to be faster than no GC. So Go's new GC is good - for a mark and sweep collector. But it can't compete with a moving collector (the only thing that can is arenas, which are user-friendly only in Zig).
> We are using JDK25 and are considering rewriting parts of our product to Go because of lower memory pressure and faster startup time, i.e., cloud friendly.
Java probably will never have perfect warmup, but it's getting very good - https://openjdk.org/jeps/544 - probably in JDK 28.
As for memory, I think Java's memory strategy is generally misunderstood and I've given a talk about it: https://youtu.be/xr73mR7ii9M The footprint overhead exists to compensate for CPU utilisation when the CPU utilisation is more disruptive than memory usage. The problem is that many Java developers - and I'm not blaming them - don't understand this tradeoff and how to configure the JVM for optimal resource usage, but the great news is that a solution is coming soon, too - https://openjdk.org/jeps/8377305 - also possibly in JDK 28.
So it's very likely that both of these issues will be resolved six months from today, and you'd still get to enjoy better performance and telemetry than all alternatives.