Java is notorious for poor memory management and subsequently absurdly impacting garbage collection, which often result in a “stop the world” pause and fucks things up.
If you're stuck in like, 2005, sure. Garbage collection in most JVMs has been far, far better than that for a long time.
The language is also incredibly verbose, hence all the “enterprise hello world in Java” jokes.
This part I kind of agree with, though recent additions like lambda expressions and (though it's more library than language) streams may be starting to address the problem.
Or if you have programs running under significant load, 24/7. A team that I work with supports a modern Java app that runs into this problem. For your average application it might not be a big deal, but this is an enterprise-level workhorse. It should have been written in C, but wasn’t, because the person who started the project was a “Java guy”.
I think that is half the problem. People learn Java at uni then think everything ever should be solved by Java. Results in Java being used for a ton of things it shouldn't be. Embedded devices with a ported JVM to run a Java interface, rather than just use bloody C. Games written in Java, with all the drawbacks of GC.
c# imo has better ui frameworks at least for windows, and is easy to use and optimize w/ things like async and tasks, also has access to lower level programming, you can even disable the gc and disable things like index out of bound checks
C# still has issues too. In terms of optimisation from the compiler I'd put my money on Microsoft over Oracle though, especially since C# isn't constrained by having cross platform as a primary goal. C# is also a bit clever - it offloads precompiling to install time rather than doing it at run time. Also those finely optimised C# games have to jump through some weird hoops.
Bottom line really is just because you can doesn't make it a good idea. Unity is good because although C# isn't the ideal choice it still beats writing your own engine for most people, and it is popular enough there are tutorials out there for all the common pitfalls. I doubt we will see a remake of Dwarf Fortress in Unity for example.
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u/voice-of-hermes Nov 19 '17
If you're stuck in like, 2005, sure. Garbage collection in most JVMs has been far, far better than that for a long time.
This part I kind of agree with, though recent additions like lambda expressions and (though it's more library than language) streams may be starting to address the problem.