Should Java be more high level or low level?

Overview

Java 8 is bringing much antisipated features such as Lambda expressions, Type Annotations and Virtual Extensions.

While this functionality is a) valuable, b) playing catch up with cooler languages, are these richer, higher level functionality the only area Java should be focused.

What are the most widely used languages

There are many ways to assess which are the most widely used languages. One index which attempts to consider a wide variety of sources is the Tiobe Index. The positions and ratings are taken from Jan 2013.

Position Programming Language Ratings Age Cooler Level
1 C 17.9% older no lower (much)
2 Java 17.4% same no same
3 Objective-C 10.3% older no lower
4 C++ 9.1% older no lower
5 C# 6.2% newer yes lower (slightly)
6 PHP 5.5% older yes higher
7 (Visual) Basic 4.7% older no same?
8 Python 4.2% older no higher
9 Perl 2.3% older no higher
10 JavaScript 2.0% same no higher
11 Ruby 1.8% older yes higher
12 Visual Basic .NET 1.0% newer no higher
13 Lisp 1.0% older no higher
14 Pascal 0.9% older no same
15 Delphi/Object Pascal 0.9% older no higher
16 Ada 0.7% older no same?
17 MATLAB 0.6% older no higher
18 Lua 0.6% older yes higher
19 Assembly 0.6% older no lower (much)
20 Bash 0.6% older no higher

The "Age" is based on the initial release date, the "cooler" is purely subjective on my part, and the "Level" column is whether the language supports lower level functionality or is it designed to be more abstract/higher level.

What I take from this list that there are many higher level languages, but the really popular ones support lower level constructs. e.g. Java is the only one in the top 5 not to support structs directly. (It has an optimisation which can work aorund this to a small degree)

Conclusion

While Java should be looking to add higher level functionality, it should also consider the lower level features languages like the *C* languages support as these are likely to become more popular as there will be more mobile and embedded devices in the future.

Comments

  1. Anonymous8 January 2013 at 12:37

    Java 8 also plans to introduce fairly low level stuff. How about, for example, the introduction of the `@Contended` annotation to (try to) solve false sharing issues? (http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/hotspot-dev/2012-November/007309.html) It seems like that one is going to go through. On the other hand, I'm not sure if JEP 169 (http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/169) will make it (sort of structs)...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Peter Lawrey8 January 2013 at 16:28

    That is an interesting addition. You can do much the same with padding, but it would be a real pain for anything non-trivial.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Alejandro11 January 2013 at 09:00

    Languages based on VM should be "higher" level, it is no point making a VM language very "low level", what is the VM for then? Or do you want to develop bytecode assembler code?

    C# is basically what Java should (have) be(en) and it shares same abstraction level, and other languages, C and C++ have clearly other purposes, in general, than Java. Objective-C is just an anecdote due to iPhone and (very little) OSX, but not used anywhere else...

    In my opinion, Java should evolve à la C#, adding kind of LINQ, etc.., Java 8 brings, but being very conservative and keeping backwards compatibility, and, maybe, relying most functional/dynamic features to Scala/Clojure and Groovy initiatives.

    Rgds

    ReplyDelete
  4. Rüdiger Möller9 July 2013 at 20:55

    I miss structs hard in Java. This would enable en/de-coding-free messaging (similar to casting a void* to struct* in C), very fast instantiation of data structures, off-heap without the mess, stack allocation for zero-GC realtime parts of a software, control over memory layout, ease interfacing with native languages ...

    However http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/169 did not convince me from a language-conceptual perspective ..

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Java is Very Fast, If You Don’t Create Many Objects

Image
  You still have to watch how many objects you create. This article looks at a benchmark passing events over TCP/IP at 4 billion events per minute using the net.openhft.chronicle.wire.channel package in Chronicle Wire and why we still avoid object allocations..  One of the key optimisations is creating almost no garbage. Allocation is a very cheap operation and collection of very short-lived objects is also very cheap. Does this really make a difference? What difference does one small object per event (44 bytes) make to the performance in a throughput test where GC pauses are amortised? While allocation is as efficient as possible, it doesn’t avoid the memory pressure on the L1/L2 caches of your CPUs and when many cores are busy, they are contending for memory in the shared L3 cache.  Results Benchmark on a Ryzen 5950X with Ubuntu 22.10. JVM Vendor, Version No objects Throughput, Average Latency* One object per event Throughput, Average Latency* Azul Zulu 1.8.0_322 60.6 ...
Read more

System wide unique nanosecond timestamps

A Unique Identifier can be very useful for tracing. Those ids are even more useful when they contain a high-resolution timestamp.  Not only do they record the time of an event, but if unique can help trace events as they pass through the system. Such unique timestamps however can be expensive depending on how they are implemented.   This post explores a lightweight means of producing a unique, monotonically increasing system-wide nano-second resolution timestamp available in our open-source library. Uses for Unique Identifiers Unique identifiers can be useful to associate with a piece of information so that information can be referred to later unambiguously. This could be an event, a request, an order id, or a customer id. They can naturally be used as a primary key in a database or key/value store to retrieve that information later. One of the challenges of generating these identifiers is avoiding creating duplicates while not having an increasing cost.  You could ...
Read more

What does Chronicle Software do?

Image
Overview Chronicle Software is about simplifying fast data.  It is a suite of libraries to make it easier to write, monitor and tune data processing systems where performance and scalability are concerned. But its free, how do you make money, through support? We offer premium support . However, we often hear from users for the first time about a year after they have it in production.  Most users find they can support the software themselves.  It is only after a year or so, they have questions or concerns about where to take the product next.  In many cases, it is to a problem we have already solved and they just need to upgrade their software or use a new module we have added. As we don't know who is using most of our software, we can't advise them on how best to use our software and what updates or enhancements they would benefit from. We need users to contact us and ask questions.  We have a free forum , and we respond to 50% of questions in 2 hours...
Read more