The Managed Runtime Initiative [LWN.net]

The Managed Runtime Initiative

Posted Jun 17, 2010 15:42 UTC (Thu) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455)
In reply to: The Managed Runtime Initiative by elanthis
Parent article: The Managed Runtime Initiative

"The apps you see written in other languages besides C# and Java are just generally tiny little micro apps barely worthy of being called an actual "application." They have small heap sizes, few allocated objects for the memory manager to deal with, and many are short-lived tools that will start and finish very quickly."

Hmmm, that sounds like better memory management to me. Good programmers have been writing small modular programs which do not live forever and work well together to create larger systems for decades. There are many reasons for this and easier/better memory management is on the list.

Java programmers/system designers seem to be the only programmers in the world who do not take advantage of this model. Maybe because with java, no one ever wants to leave the JVM, doing a fork from java is considered a horrible mistake (and will take many servers down)? This NIH java disease is the reason that many java apps have horrible memory problems (a program already exists to do that, well, it's not in java... rewrite) Without using pipes and forking, it is hard to create large robust modular programs in any language. Only java programmers would even dream of it.

So, it is not java so much that is the problem, but the mindset when using it: I cannot fork, that would not be portable...(and uncool?) Not to mention the slow JVM startup times.

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The Managed Runtime Initiative

Posted Jun 18, 2010 10:05 UTC (Fri) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

> Without using pipes and forking, it is hard to create large robust modular programs in any language.

Agreed.

On the other hand, please tell us how to implement Eclipse or Emacs using a bunch of independent and loosely connected processes.

Even better: please tell us how to implement something as powerful and fast as Linux using a micro-kernel and a bunch of loosely connected daemons :-P

The Managed Runtime Initiative

Posted Jun 18, 2010 15:48 UTC (Fri) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link]

Eclipse -> KDE (except KDE does so much more in so much less memory, and still, I would not call it efficient)
Emacs -> Vi + 1000 other small unix utilities

Linux, well, we have to reverse things here a bit, linux is somewhat large, but still modularization was defined early by the original unix devs. So the image looks more like this.

multics -> linux + 1000 other small unix utilities.

Remeber how often the "do it in userspace" slogan is shouted from linux kernel devs. Perhaps if the java devs used a bit more of this approach (i.e. do not use the same JVM for everything) they would not be suggesting to expand the kernel just so that JVMs can get bigger! Note how different from normal scalable program requests that is. This is not a request to" "be able to create 1 billion threads/processes and to switch efficiently and fairly among them", or "to communicate between them with low overhead"..., no it is a request to fundamentally support using larger and larger monolithic programs. One might ask why the JVM even needs an OS, why not just run it straight on the iron and optimize the hell out of it, for this single use case, isn't that what the java devs really want? ;)