this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2024
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Let's reinvent java bytecode but... different

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[–] [email protected] 82 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Do you really think the reason people hate Java is because it uses an intermediate bytecode? There's plenty of reasons to hate Java, but that's not one of them.

.NET languages use intermediate bytecode and everyone's fine with it.

Any complaints about Java being an intermediate language are due to the fact that the JVM is a poorly implemented dumpster fire. It's had more major vulnerabilities than effing Adobe Flash, and runs like molasses while chewing up more memory than effing Chrome. It's not what they did, it's that they did it badly.

And WASM will absolutely never replace normal JS in the browser. It's a completely different use case. It's awesome and has a great niche, but it's not really intended for normal web page management use cases.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (3 children)

And WASM will absolutely never replace normal JS in the browser. It's a completely different use case. It's awesome and has a great niche, but it's not really intended for normal web page management use cases.

While I overall agree that JS / TS isn't likely to be replaced, Microsoft's Blazor project is interesting conceptually .... Write C# webpages and have it compile down to WASM for more performance than JS could offer.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Interesting, yeah. I inherited a Blazor project though and have nothing positive to say about it really. Some of it is probably implementation, but it's a shining example of how much better it is to choose the right tool for the job, rather than reinventing the wheel. For a while I was joking about setting the whole project "ablazor" until we finally decided to go back to a React/C# ASP.NET stack. If you're thinking of using Blazor still, though, I think two fun things to look into are "linting issues with Blazor" and "Blazor slow". I've heard people praise it, but they tend to be those who consider themselves backend devs that occasionally get stuck making frontends.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Do you really think the reason people hate Java is because it uses an intermediate bytecode? There’s plenty of reasons to hate Java, but that’s not one of them.

No, I do not. It's a meme.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Which is functionally identical to the last one you posted. Are you just doing the same joke in every format you can? Fuck the internet sucks now.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

but its not really intended for normal webpages

But I really want to make full stack web apps with rust!

https://www.arewewebyet.org/topics/frameworks/#pkg-actix-web

[–] [email protected] 76 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I mean, hardly anyone complaining about Java does so because of JVM bytecode.

I'm not sure, where the wasm hate is coming from.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago

It all comes from OP.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No hate, just a stupid meme. WASM has the possibility of replacing JS in the browser, however it had to reinvent the JVM 🤷 As long as it gets rid of the JS dominance in browsers, I'm all for it.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It probably won't get rid of js's dominance, but it'll give people options. I already see some front end python and rust frameworks thanks to wasm. But for some reason I really don't like the idea of writing html / css in my rust. But I don't like the idea of html / css in my rust.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I really don’t like the idea of writing html / css in my rust

Yeah, I'm not sure if there are very good alternatives to that. Everything I've seen tends to go in that direction: markup language + stylesheet language. But HTML and CSS for sure aren't the best.

There's HAML and Pug, which I did enjoy writing much more than HTML.

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[–] [email protected] 45 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The main difference is that WASM is an agnostic bytecode without a gc while the jvm is opinionated in a java way. It has a gc, focus on dynamic dispatch and it has knowledge of concepts like exceptions, classes and visibility.

All this leaking of abstractions means languages like java and kotlin are well suited, scala has hit problems and c couldn't be compiled to java bytecode.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Of course, technically you can compile anything to almost anything. But I don’t think linking to a project that’s unmaintained for 15 years really helps your argument.

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Java is disliked because it’s designed around flawed OOP principles developed in the 80s and 90s. The code easily turn into a mess if you adhere to these principles, because they’re flawed. If you avoid using these principles, you will still get a mess, because that’s not how Java is supposed to be used.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Java was such a fractal of stupid design choices in its early years, and a lot of it is still there. OOP except when it's not (int vs Integer, [] arrays but also List et al), no unsigned number types, initially no way to do closures or pass methods around so everything had to be wrapped in super verbose bullshit, initially absolutely dogshit multiparadigm support and very noun-oriented, initally no generics either meaning everything's an Object, when it did get generics they had to do type erasure for backwards compatibility, etc etc etc

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Also: everything is nullable. There are no safety guarantees to ensure you’ve done the necessary null checks. And if you miss your program will crash.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Oh yeah how did I forget the billion dollar mistake, definitely one of the worst misfeatures of Java

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I think having null is great in some cases where you need to represent missing value. It’s just that there’s no good way to know for sure if you need to do null checks or not. The only way around it is to do null checks everywhere, which no one wants to do because fuck that. Nowadays there’s Optional which solves some of this, but it was introduced way too late.

If I were to redesign Java the first thing I would do is to add a nullable keyword or something.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I think having null is great in some cases where you need to represent missing value.

Option types or sum types would probably be a much less terrible choice for this, although I guess some sort of nullable keyword counts as a sum type

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Well, anything that can be captured at compile time or by the IDE is infinitely better than the situation we have today.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago

There is an XKCD for that. Replace "standards" with "programming languages".

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (7 children)

The problem with java is the language and how it works itself, and not the byte code idea.
I say that as a few things do that and .net, java and wasm are the first that jump to mind.
Hell, pure technically any programming language that is not asm does that :')

My problem is java itself, not its byte code. Wasm as advantage, imo, is that its not stuck to a single language like java is. .net blazor can build to wasm, but you could also use c++ to compile wasm applications :)

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

WASM = WebAssembly,
this has nothing to do with Java,
but with JS (JavaScript).

JS works with JIT (Just In Time) compilation, meaning every user that requests a web page, will request the JS and your browser will compile that JS on the fly as you request it.

WASM on the other hand is pre-compiled once, by the developer, when he/she is making the code. So when a user requests a WASM binary, they don't have to wait for JIT compilation, since it was already pre-compiled by the developer.

They only have to wait for a tiny piece of JS,
which is still JIT compiled,
a tiny piece of JS to load in the WASM binary.

This saves the user from waiting on JIT compilation and thus speeds up requesting web pages.

WASM also increases security,
since binaries are harder to reverse engineer then plain text JS.

Due to those reasons,
I believe WASM will be the future for Web development.

No clue why people are hating on WASM,
but I guess they just don't grasp all of the above yet.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

Having read a significant portion of the base WASM spec, it's really quite a beautiful format. It's well designed, clear, and very agnostic.

I particularly like how sectioned it is, which allows different functions to be preloaded/parsed/whatever independently.

It's not perfect by any means; I personally find it has too many instructions, and the block-based control flow is... strange. But it fills a great niche as a standard low-level isolated programming layer.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Wasm code (binary code, i.e. bytecode) is intended to be run on a portable virtual stack machine (VM)

WASM wikipedia

Java bytecode is the instruction set of the Java virtual machine (JVM), crucial for executing programs written in the Java language and other JVM-compatible languages

java bytecode

Need I say more?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

OK

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Please do say more because I don’t think the argument you’re trying to make is coming across clearly. Obviously your intelligence is at a level far higher than us low-iq plebs, and we need your brilliant mastery of these topics to be poetically spelled out for us. For we are not worthy otherwise.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'll be chilling over in PHP. Let me know when you're ready for a real language.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

You can't compile C to java bytecode, they are fundamentally incompatible. But you can compile C to wasm, which is what you want for a good universal bytecode. Java is shit.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)
  1. Compile jvm into wasm
  2. ???
  3. Be universally hated
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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

May I introduce you to https://github.com/davidar/lljvm

The C to JVM bytecode compilation provided by LLJVM involves several steps

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Have you seen what it outputs? The same way we can compile C to brainfuck, it doesn't mean it's good or is useful.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)
  • "compiling C to java bytecode isn't possible"
  • *link to project that does exactly that*
  • "it's not good or useful"
  • *WASM exists*
  • "that's useful"

... OK

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I can't quite understand what is your point? Are you arguing that both JVM and WASM are bad? With this I agree, they both have terrible performance and in an ideal world we wouldn't use any of them.

Are you arguing that JVM bytecode is better than WASM? That's objectively not true. One example is a function pointer in C. To compile it to JVM bytecode you would need to convert it to the virtual call using some very roundabout way. But in WASM you have native support for function pointers, which gives much better flexibility when compiling other languages.

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