
You could have invented the LMAX Disruptor, if only you were limited enough - hmijail
https://hmijailblog.blogspot.com/2018/08/you-could-have-invented-lmax-disruptor.html
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jandrese
What this says to me is that Java's reputation for sluggishness is a result of
its idiomatic coding styles more than the language itself. In particular the
casual way people allocate and discard objects for everything they do.

If you program it like it was C then you can get good performance, which make
sense given that the language was built for embedded devices with anemic
processors. Of course you undoubtedly give up some maintainability when you do
that, but the tradeoff is getting 6 million packets through the thing per
second.

This would also explain why Java benchmarks so well but still tends to be slow
in the real world.

~~~
wmfiv
Java's reputation for sluggishness was really formed based on people's
experience with Applets and Swing applications and especially badly written
Applets and Swing applications.

Java in the real world is fast. That's why it's used as the backbone of so
many large organizations and so many scale out solutions (Cassandra, Kafka,
Hadoop, etc) are written in Java.

~~~
pjc50
Yes, I'd take this in conjunction with
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17824575](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17824575)
: "language speed" and "UI responsiveness" are only loosely related, and there
are so many ways to end up wasting time blocking or locking without really
realising it.

------
draw_down
This is the kind of thing I really love reading. It’s ostensibly about a
technical subject, but that’s really a jumping-off point for examining how we
think and talk about things, how portions of our field become Balkanized, how
what we encounter shapes our sense of what’s possible and ultimately hardens
into “common knowledge”.

~~~
scarejunba
Reminded me of the reaction to this paper in Medicine
[https://doi.org/10.2337/diacare.17.2.152](https://doi.org/10.2337/diacare.17.2.152)

It's just rudimentary integration approximation to a mathematics undergraduate
but to those in Medicine unfamiliar with it, it was an achievement.

~~~
hmijail
That sounds really interesting. Can you point to any of those reactions?

~~~
scarejunba
When it was discovered by the Mathematics community it was met with
bemusement. Sorry, I'm recalling from memory here from years ago when I was a
graduate student in Mathematics and don't have ready posts.

Meanwhile, it accumulated 300 citations in medicine and chem
[https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C4&q=A+Ma...](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C4&q=A+Mathematical+Model+for+the+Determination+of+Total+Area+Under+Glucose+Tolerance+and+Other+Metabolic+Curves&btnG=)

