Oracle Releases GraalVM 21.3 With Java 17 Support, Other Enhancements

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Oracle Releases GraalVM 21.3 With Java 17 Support, Other Enhancements

Oracle has published its latest quarterly update to GraalVM, the open-source Java JVM/JDK implemented in Java that also supports other execution modes and programming languages from Python to R to Ruby...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GraalVM-21.3-Released

[uid313]

I used to code in Java 6 (and partly 7 and maybe 8) in Android, and it was really shitty, then came Kotlin which was a fresh breeze.
How has Java evolved since then, and how is Java 17? Is it still shitty, or is it nice nowadays?

[grung]

Java8 was big improvement and 17 is much better. If you combine it with Project Lombok it is quite pleasant experience.

[coder111]

Java 8 was a major step up compared to Java 6 or 7. Any more recent versions are pretty good.

[GreenToad]

I used to code in Java 6 (and partly 7 and maybe 8) in Android, and it was really shitty, then came Kotlin which was a fresh breeze.
How has Java evolved since then, and how is Java 17? Is it still shitty, or is it nice nowadays?

A lot nicer but not yet as nice as kotlin. Some of the new things since 8 are "var", switch expressions, helpful nullpointerexceptions, text blocks, records, sealed classes and some pattern matching.

[Shnatsel]

It would be interesting to see benchmarks comparing GraalVM community edition to GraalVM enterprise and to OpenJDK.

[tildearrow]

I used to code in Java 6 (and partly 7 and maybe 8) in Android, and it was really shitty, then came Kotlin which was a fresh breeze.
How has Java evolved since then, and how is Java 17? Is it still shitty, or is it nice nowadays?

I think of it like a C++ but with more verbosity, automatic memory management, no header files and a ultra-simplified type system in where everything is a pointer except for int, long, float, double, short, byte and char.

[bug77]

I used to code in Java 6 (and partly 7 and maybe 8) in Android, and it was really shitty, then came Kotlin which was a fresh breeze.
How has Java evolved since then, and how is Java 17? Is it still shitty, or is it nice nowadays?

8 brought some functional-like traits to the language, but it has barely improved since. Everything in Java these days (the language, not JVM) is about catching up with features Kotlin or Scala have offered for years. GraalVM ain't gonna fix any of that
It's not that the language itself is bad (it's quite readable, compared to many others), it's just that OOP everywhere doesn't really fit many of the things you're required to implement these days.

[uid313]

I think of it like a C++ but with more verbosity, no header files and a ultra-simplified type system in where everything is a pointer except for int, long, float, double, short, byte and char.

Yeah, that's one way to see it, but it also provides also garbage collection and exceptions.

8 brought some functional-like traits to the language, but it has barely improved since. Everything in Java these days (the language, not JVM) is about catching up with features Kotlin or Scala have offered for years. GraalVM ain't gonna fix any of that
It's not that the language itself is bad (it's quite readable, compared to many others), it's just that OOP everywhere doesn't really fit many of the things you're required to implement these days.

Well, Java 6 (pretty much) when I used it was shitty, there were no properties (you had to declare your own get and set methods), there were no lambda/closures, etc. I much prefer C# over Java, but I don't know if Java has improved since then.

[tildearrow]

Yeah, that's one way to see it, but it also provides also garbage collection and exceptions.

Fixed my post.
By the way, C++ does have exceptions as well and the standard library does use many of them.

Well, Java 6 (pretty much) when I used it was shitty, there were no properties (you had to declare your own get and set methods), there were no lambda/closures, etc. I much prefer C# over Java, but I don't know if Java has improved since then.

Java 8 and higher have support for lambdas in the form of Predicate, using this syntax:

(arg) -> {
  CODE
  return <value>;
}