Doron's .NET Space

A Trip to Java Land

I’m a C# guy, and always have been. I haven’t done any Java-ing since my days at the university, so I was glad of the opportunity to a do Java-related task at work. It was really a tiny little thing, but I got a little taste of the state Java is in and thought I would share.

Now, I’m hardly objective, and I’m basing this on a few hours of work tops. Also, any criticism I have is against Java the language, not Java the Framework.

So, with the disclaimers out of the way, let the rant begin. Basically, coding in Java is like coding in some sort of non existent C# 1.5. Here’s why:

No Linq and Lambda expressions. I found myself implementing stuff like Max and Average which I thought I would never have to again. I didn’t realize how used I got to the productivity that Linq+lambda expressions enable. They really have to write a lot of loops in Java, which is no fun.

Generics in Java suck. Basically, in Java a List<String> is a List<Object> and not a type by itself. This means, that among other issues, you can’t create a List<int>, only a List<Integer> so boxing is required, and performance suffers. This was done for backward compatibility purposes – since in Java generics is a compiler feature and not a framework supported feature, newer code can run on older versions of Java. But it results in a Generics implementation that is much worse than the C# one. This is the reason I think Java 7 is actually not as good as C# 2.0 was (not to talk about C# 4.0).

Simple operations are not simple enough. This is probably me at my most nitpicking, but I was really missing stuff like File.ReadAllLines and other file operations in Java. Of course, they can be easily implemented and I’m sure many did implement them, but it’s nice of .NET to give this out of the box. I consider this nitpicking, because there are probably lots of library methods in Java that are missing in C# and I just don’t know them. But still, reading a file, come on, make it trivial!

To end in a more positive note, as someone who hardly knows any Java I was up and running with an IDE (netbeans) in no time, and the experience was pretty similar to Visual Studio. It is definitely beginner friendly, and there is a ton of material on the web. Too bad the language is not up to par.

Visual Studio x64 is Not to Be

I was informed today that a Visual Studio user voice issue I voted on was dismissed. The issue is “Create an x64 version of Visual Studio”, and around 1300 people voted for it. Sadly, Microsoft decided it’s not going to happen any time soon. Visual Studio’s program manager, Nathan Halstead, explains:

After reviewing telemetry on memory utilization, the scale of typical data sets loaded in Visual Studio, and hardware trends across our user base, we determined that one of the most effective ways to improve memory utilization across our entire user based would be to directly focus our efforts on overall memory reduction and improving scalability of key pieces of the product working with large data sets. While creating an x64 version of Visual Studio would unlock a virtually unlimited amount of memory to the Visual Studio process, most of our users would not see a direct performance or reliability benefit from this change alone.

In essence, building an x64 version of VS is a huge undertaking, and they just don’t think it’s worth it. Most users won’t tell the difference. Visual Studio 11 is already known to not have native x64 support, and looks like we can’t expect version 12 to be any different.

And that, well, kinda sucks. Why? Well:

I am regularly approaching the 2GB memory limit in my VS process. Visual Studio + Resharper work their magic together. As projects get bigger and more complex, it seems almost crazy to me that Microsoft doesn’t intend to support the ever growing demands of teams working with its IDE, and more than a few plugins. They may reduce the IDE memory consumption itself, but they can’t control the amount of memory plugins use – and plugins like Resharper are almost a must in every developer’s toolbox these days. And you can be sure that as the tools we use get smarter, they would need more memory. So yes, it’s a big project, but if they don’t begin it now, they’ll have some angry developers on their heads in a couple of years.