alt Hacker NewsWhile Java can outperform Go in some cases, the situation is very much the opposite when it comes to Rust.
I also don't see the case for stability. Yes, if you're still on JDK 8, it would probably chug on for a couple of years. But we were talking about greenfield projects and newer JDK go EOL much faster. If you want patches, you'll have to run your app to a newer JDK, which may break a couple of things. Rust (within the same edition) or Go (within the same major version) break less than that.
As far as runtime compatibility goes, Rust and Go apps ship with the runtime. This can be better or worse for you, depending on what is your upgrade story, but I don't see a clear winner here. What I would give to Java over Rust is that you will have far fewer dependencies to take care of if you need to upgrade. But the same goes for Go.
For observability, I feel that with Rust you have a bit less that you need to observe (no GC to worry about). Tokio tracing is great, but observability requires a bit more effort. The go observability story is far worse. So Java probably has an edge here, but not something that ever felt like a game changer. My impression is that for most of the enterprise shops that love Java, observability means collecting unstructured log files through NFS and trying to find a needle in the haystack with primitive tools, but I've been out of touch with this world for a couple of years.
Productivity is something that is dead if you are AI-heavy. Sure, many shops are still wary about AI, and I totally get why, but this is a battle that's already been lost. Without AI, I would say I was about 3 to 4 times more productive in Rust than I was in Java, but ramping up that productivity took at least 1 year of practice. It's not time most companies are willing to spend. With AI, this doesn't matter anymore, for better or worse.
I'm not arguing that Java is not chosen often for greenfield projects. It's clearly extremely popular in many circles, especially outside startups and big tech. But I think the reason Java is chosen have little to do with the reasons you've mentioned above and more with organizational preferences.
Replies
> the situation is very much the opposite when it comes to Rust.
It isn't, and the problem isn't Rust specifically, but all low-level languages. They can offer very good performance (often better than Java) when small. But as they evolve over time, or are very large to begin with, they become much harder to keep performant. This is for pretty fundamental constraints of low-level language that I mention in another comment here, and this performance problem with large programs written in low-level languages was well known before Java even existed. The JVM was designed, at least in part, to address it.
One of the things that drew me to Java (from years of C++, even though I still work in C++ when I work on the JVM) is precisely how it addresses those performance issues we ran into with C++ five years into a project.
> As far as runtime compatibility goes, Rust and Go apps ship with the runtime. This can be better or worse for you, depending on what is your upgrade story, but I don't see a clear winner here.
I wasn't talking about "runtime compatibility" but of overall version compatibility. Java has an unmatched compatibility record - not perfect, but better than anything else (with at least a medium-sized standard library).
> For observability, I feel that with Rust you have a bit less that you need to observe (no GC to worry about).
Memory management is very often a bigger issue without a GC than with a moving GC. Time and again we see Rust or C++ programs spend 30-50% on memory management.
> Productivity is something that is dead if you are AI-heavy.
Really? Have you had AI write a good medium-sized (say 100-500 KLOC) program or maintain one over a long period of time without very close reviews? The only people I've seen who don't know about the ticking time-bomb agents leave in the codebase are the people who don't look.
> With AI, this doesn't matter anymore, for better or worse.
You may be talking about small programs. I agree that for small programs, low-level languages can offer excellent performance, and AI can be okayish, and you can get some observability you can live with, but I'm talking about large programs.
> But I think the reason Java is chosen have little to do with the reasons you've mentioned above and more with organizational preferences.
Those organisational preferences are due to a long record of delivering on the things I mentioned. Java has an exceptionally low "regret factor", i.e. people who regret choosing it five, ten, or fifteen years into a project (which is when the problems usually start).
> I also don't see the case for stability. Yes, if you're still on JDK 8, it would probably chug on for a couple of years. But we were talking about greenfield projects and newer JDK go EOL much faster. If you want patches, you'll have to run your app to a newer JDK, which may break a couple of things. Rust (within the same edition) or Go (within the same major version) break less than that.
Java also breaks very few things. Breaking binary compatibility is a no-go since it's a core promise of the platform. The only thing in the surface language that has ever been changed is the meaning of the underscore as an identifier, as well as the behavior of == in upcoming Project Valhalla.
> As far as runtime compatibility goes, Rust and Go apps ship with the runtime.
Java applications can also be shipped together with the runtime.
> Productivity is something that is dead if you are AI-heavy.
Nevertheless, making constructs available to express intent more clearly should also help LLMs to not go off the rails.