
Microsoft’s Ready to Contribute to OpenJDK - Alupis
https://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/discuss/2019-October/005173.html
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polskibus
Please MS, increase development resources behind net and c# instead. It will
benefit Java more than direct Java development - competition will give Java
more motivation to grow.

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bhauer
You say that as if they are somehow being sparing in their support of C# and
.NET, which is clearly not true. What specifically do you see as lacking on
that front?

~~~
polskibus
The speed of development, the scope and quality of new language features has
dropped significantly ever since Hejlsberg left C#.

C# with .Net should compete with Go and rust these days, fight for the
mindshare of developers.

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deburo
I don't understand your concern.

I think Mads Torgersen & co. are doing a wonderful job.

We've had a new version of C# with each new (recent at least) release of
Visual Studio.

Did you have issues with the quality of new features? I'm really puzzled by
your comment.

~~~
polskibus
What I meant is that most of the recent C# additions are merely syntactic
sugar that does not increase developer productivity in a significant way, does
not boost the expressiveness of the language, sometimes even decreases the
readability of the code. That's in contrast to things like generics and li q.

Besides apart from C# there's also CLR and Jit that could use more love. It is
well known that jvm is a better vm than CLR. Most of the CLR speed comes from
using references to value types but somewhat as an afterthought and without
tools that C++ provides (readonly gives you muh less power that const
reference).

~~~
ksec
This is somewhat a strange take.

Apart from Borrow Checker which is a recent invention, all programming
languages features, as far as I am concern has been done previously in one way
or another. There is only so many language features you can fit in on a
languages like C# which is soon to be 20 years old. It is a sign of maturity.
And C# in itself is already very modern compared to Java.

Most of the JVM performance improvement came from many Enterprise customers
absolutely pushing the limit to a point where performance of JVM today would
be unthinkable 10 - 20 years ago. It is the work a hundreds of millions if not
billions over the past two decade. And it is not like Microsoft are not doing
research on how to speed it up.

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stuff4ben
I like the direction the "new" Microsoft is going! Hopefully they'll behave
themselves this time (re: Visual J++, etc)

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bhauer
J++ might get a bad rap in hindsight, but back in the day, it was amazing. The
editor was liquid smooth, performance wise, and the compiler was at least a
dozen times faster than the JDK Java compiler. It was like the Jikes compiler
before Jikes.

I recall using Visual J++ and its compiler to do "pure Java" development back
then and it was a delight. I only moved to Eclipse later because Eclipse had a
deeper understanding of the Java language and was able to do fancy things like
traverse a call stack from static code analysis. Eclipse was considerably
slower in UI and responsiveness, especially on hardware of the time, but that
utility made up for it.

~~~
ben7799
I think Eclipse is probably still slower on modern hardware than Visual J++
was in 1999-2000, which was the last time I used it.

The first commercial Java project I worked on we used Visual J++. It was a
great environment at the time, there was very little else available if I
remember correctly. Sun had something which was horrible.

Eclipse is so bad I think those of us who have been in the Java camp for
years/decades/whole career have lost sight of just how much better the MS
tools were/are.

I don't even remember feeling as much frustration towards VC++ in the 1990s as
I do with Eclipse today.

It's too easy to forget Mac wasn't even an option back then. OSX didn't start
to become viable till 2003-2004.

I've officially been doing Java 20 years now... part of me really wants to
jump the fence and go work on Windows stuff. I jumped the fence to work on
Python 6 years ago. But it was "Python being used for stuff Java is 10x better
for" and got tired of it after a year. Python is 10x better than Java for lots
of things.. but not for giant enterprise systems IMO.

~~~
bhauer
Agreed. It may be true that Eclipse on a Ryzen 9 doesn't feel as responsive as
Visual J++ on a Pentium III. J++ was just that much faster than Eclipse. Then
again, for my usage, the J++ environment was not much more than a syntax-
colored text editor with project files and a method and field browser.

Like I said, when Eclipse arrived a few years later, it provided a lot of
utility that J++ did not, and obviously that utility has value. But I think
both of us look back fondly on J++ because we know that had it not been cut
short, it could have evolved into something different and possibly even better
than what we know as Java today. It seems plausible that in an alternate
history where J++ kept evolving, I'd be more satisfied with the state of the
art.

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shortlived
>> As many of you may know, Microsoft and its subsidiaries are heavily
dependent on Java in many aspects, and also offers Java runtimes in its
Microsoft Azure cloud to its customers.

Anyone know details on how MS uses Java outside of hosted runtimes?

~~~
Analemma_
I'm mystified as well. I worked at Microsoft for seven years and never once
heard any mention of Java. Maybe it's in the acquisitions? (GitHub, LinkedIn,
etc.)

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ToFab123
It is for azure to ensure java runs smoothly there. Similar to how they pushed
code to the linux kernel years ago so linux and hyper-v would play nice
together.

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chungy
Microsoft's apparently not ready to use line breaks.

Seriously, people that write lines like that... just... why. What email client
is even allowing it?

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BonesJustice
Why put in hard breaks when pretty much any email client should support
soft/flexible line wrapping?

Seems more like an issue with the linked site to me.

~~~
Leace
format=flowed is a reasonable middle-ground:
[https://joeclark.org/ffaq.html](https://joeclark.org/ffaq.html)

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kerng
Cool, looks according to post submission this actually happened end of
October.

How did it go so far? Anyone know more?

~~~
brunoborges
So far we have submitted couple patches [1][2] that we felt were good
opportunities to learn how contributions flow into OpenJDK, and we are now
starting to experiment with JFR and other GCs like Shenandoah. As we progress,
we may find other fixes and enhancements that we aim at upstreaming as well.

If you have further questions, I'd be happy to take them.

Best,

Bruno Borges,

PM for Java at Microsoft

[1]
[https://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk/jdk/rev/aebd72de84b0](https://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk/jdk/rev/aebd72de84b0)

[2]
[https://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk/jdk/rev/c6e474ae266b](https://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk/jdk/rev/c6e474ae266b)

[3] [https://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/shenandoah-
dev/2019-...](https://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/shenandoah-
dev/2019-December/011230.html) (still under review)

[4] [https://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/hotspot-compiler-
dev...](https://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/hotspot-compiler-
dev/2019-November/036171.html) (ongoing discussion)

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layoutIfNeeded
Sic transit gloria mundi :^)

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Java_Virtual_Machi...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Java_Virtual_Machine)

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kodablah
Is it safe to assume this doesn't include Graal because while it is shipped
with OpenJDK, AFAIK it's not a part of the project?

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abledon
Hypothetical Question: Is it at all possible to eventually merge Java and C#
back into a single language? Say in 2030 ?

~~~
UglyToad
Funnily enough I was thinking an almost identical thing this morning. We had
IKVM [0] for.NET, which if I understood it correctly allowed Java to run on
the CLR (I probably misunderstood this).

I'm not entirely sure why Microsoft don't build something official to run Java
code on the CLR/.NET, is it a technical or legal limitation, or simply that
there's no business need?

[0]: [https://www.ikvm.net/](https://www.ikvm.net/)

~~~
Ididntdothis
It would be huge if they implemented a way to run java libraries from .NET. Be
it ikvm or something else. This would immediately open up huge amounts of very
interesting libraries to .NET. For example Bouncy Castle or Lucene. Years ago
I worked on a document search app. Wrote it in .NET but then almost all
interesting libraries were in Java exclusively or with an outdated .NET port.
Being able to use the up to date java libraries would have been huge. This
experience alone makes me reluctant to use .NET. The Java ecosystem is just
much broader.

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Eduard
What would they contribute?

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nereu
cool

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m0zg
If Anders Hejlsberg is not a part of this effort, then meh. If he is, then
wow.

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ksec
What is he working on now? Wiki still list him working on C#.

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m0zg
TypeScript and C#. Both are grade AAA language efforts IMO.

