back to article Oracle's piping hot new pot of Java takes out the trash (faster)

Oracle's latest update to the Java Development Kit doesn't add any new language features or change any APIs, but it still includes a number of enhancements that should please Java developers and users. Released on Tuesday – a couple of weeks ahead of Java SE 8's first birthday – Java Development Kit 8 Update 40 (JDK 8u40) …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "Java's Garbage First (G1) garbage collector gets some polish in this release"

    Hopefully it collects itself and deletes....Java is horrible, bloated and insecure mess.

    1. smackbean

      well done for highlighting your ignorance, albeit anonymously...

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        "well done for highlighting your ignorance, albeit anonymously..."

        Which bit is ignorant? Seems spot on to me.

    2. Matt Collins

      Dear AC, all technology is insecure in some way or other, bloated is purely subjective depending on your need for the features therein and beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Nothing is perfect and it's down to _you_ as a competent person to compensate for that. When I'm Emperor, these kinds of comments will result in banishment so those of us that are looking for enlightenment, considered opinion or just genuinely funny jokes can get some peace. Get over it and yourself.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      agree with you in part. My main issue with Java is without fail nearly every one of their endless updates breaks some app that uses Java. The result being we generally stick with a release for ages, we're currently running 7update 51 but before that we had 6 update 29 for ages!

      1. Sir Alien

        Languages not at fault...

        A)

        An idiot given any language regardless of how good it supposedly is, can write terrible and vulnerable code.

        B)

        There is no bad languages, just bad programmers/designers

        C)

        In your replies case, the breakages are "normally" because the developer has not implemented the feature in a standard way and not followed any deprecation warnings. Like trying to use a Windows 3.1 application on Windows 7 and then complaining that the upgrade broke the application. The application creator should have updated it or simply said, does not support XYZ operating system. This does happen for Java, where I have encountered applications that only work with Java 6 and say that is all they support.

        1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

          Re: Languages not at fault...

          There is no bad languages, just bad programmers/designers

          That's a very hard claim to credit. There are deliberately bad programming languages - the "esoteric" languages, whether mendacious (eg INTERCAL), minimalistic ("Turing Tar-Pit" languages like Unlambda and ETA), or both (Brainfuck and many others). There are programming languages seriously intended for use but rather ill-conceived, such as MUMPS and the scripting language for Praat, or the curiously incompetent CL scripting language for IBM's AS/400. (CL's only iteration mechanism was reading entries from a data file.)

          Then there are clever languages that simply have abysmal syntax, like, oh, TEX and Web. (Knuth is a great computer scientist and writer, but lordy does he love to abuse punctuation marks). APL is another fine example.

          And finally there are languages that, while suitable for some purposes, are so ill-fitting for others that they place unreasonable demands upon even very good programmers, whose only logical course of action is to use them to implement several layers of abstraction (i.e., better languages) in which to solve the actual problem. For many projects this describes assembly languages and even popular choices such as C.

          Some commentators, of course, would have you believe that nearly all programming languages are fatally flawed. Personally I think this is ridiculous, since it suggests some aren't.

    4. DrXym

      "Hopefully it collects itself and deletes....Java is horrible, bloated and insecure mess."

      Java in a browser is (or has been insecure). Java running from a service or command line is no more or less secure than any other compiled or interpreted language / runtime.

      1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
        FAIL

        > Hopefully it collects itself and deletes....Java is horrible, bloated and insecure mess.

        > Which bit is ignorant? Seems spot on to me.

        Samefag!

  2. The Nameless Mist
    Mushroom

    Some of us have no choice

    Unfortunately those of us who deal with "front line support" have no choice in having to have Java-whoa-another-update on their end-user's computers.

    A lot of business e-banking systems use java for 2nd level authentication and they force the use of the new Java; sometimes on day0; resulting in total clusterF**K when the new Java bombs out something else.

  3. Spaceman Spiff

    Java - not suitable for enterprise applications

    I have worked with Java since it was released in the mid-1990's - I got my first cut from James Gosling himself when I presented a paper at an IEEE conference in Boston. I have studied the JVM source code and have done considerable research into garbage collection methods. Java's mark/sweep methods are inherently non-deterministic, hence Java's tendency to have problems with system behaviour and performance when dealing with memory management. At the time I met with Gosling I had finished a deterministic reference-counted garbage collector which after 20+ years is still running many major semiconductor, display, and disc drive plants world-wide. 10+ million lines of code with no deletes and no memory leaks - systems that run on a 24x365 basis. I just wish java systems I have worked on were that reliable!

    So, if you want me to work in a Java shop - go find someone else who has a taste for self-flagillation...

    1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
      Thumb Down

      ITT: Discussion GCs like it's 1989.

      I have worked with Java since it was released in the mid-1990's

      You are a re[dacted]. You know that JVM implementations have several types of GC and there are quite a few GCs for specialized applications?

      > Java's mark/sweep methods are inherently non-deterministic

      The only deterministic methods when GCing are those that have strictly pre-planned and limited memory usage. Good luck finding those outside of aerospace applications.

      > I had finished a deterministic reference-counted garbage collector which after 20+ years is still running many major semiconductor

      Yeah, I did that as a student, too. And then circular data structures showed up.

      > 10+ million lines of code with no deletes and no memory leaks

      Do you even know what you are talking about.

      > go find someone else who has a taste for self-flagillation...

      I hope somebody spell-checked your IEEE paper for you.

    2. Rolf Howarth

      Re: Java - not suitable for enterprise applications

      On the contrary, Java is eminently suitable for enterprise applications. I have worked on not one but two real time trading systems which had entirely deterministic and predictable performance. With a bit of care in tuning your garbage collector parameters and using a pool of objects it's not too difficult to ensure that the JVM never does does a full GC run. (I was part of a large team of developers so I'm not trying to claim credit for the performance, just pointing out it's eminently achievable.)

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