> Fortran is significantly faster than C, for instance.
That's news to me. Languages that are close enough to the hardware and allow for inline assembly can probably never be described as slow overall. Perhaps the author refers to some specific libraries?
> Java is the most recent popular general-purpose language
This post was written in 2022. Does the author not know about Python? Javascript? Rust? C#? and a bunch of others?
> Fortran is significantly faster than C, for instance.
AFAIK the main reason is pointer aliasing, e.g. you may need to sprinkle C code with the restrict keyword to work around the issue. "Significantly faster" is debatable of course, I bet it's possible both in Fortran and C to write code that performans equally bad.
So you're saying that the aliasing defaults of C are an issue. Well... I suppose, but - not `restrict`ing your pointers in the hottest part of the code is a bit like not compiling with optimizations on.
>> Java is the most recent popular general-purpose language
> This post was written in 2022. Does the author not know about Python? Javascript? Rust? C#? and a bunch of others?
I had to double check this - but Python is several years older than Java. Wikipedia lists 1991 for its first release, vs 1995 for Java.
That said, I felt like Python became really well-known much later than Java (which had massive hype and enthusiasm in the 90s) - so I do actually agree with you listing it here.
Unsurprisingly, Java is still the most searched term in the "Programming" category. JavaScript is catching up, but still have some way to go. Rust barely registers.
Worth keeping in mind is that what's popular in startup circles (like I'm guessing a lot of HN users come from) isn't what's popular in the 90% other types of businesses.
Fair enough - it's more fashionable that popular :-) It did close TIOBE's top 20 for 2022: https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ (and that includes non-general-purpose languages)
... but you're right in that I could have probably chosen Go or TypeScript. The point is that Java is not remotely the latest popular general-purpose programming language.
Then they'd be wrong. .net was released in 2000; Mono was 1.0 by 2004, and IIRC was usable as early as late 2002. Put another way, for almost the entire lifetime of .net (19 out of 23 years), C# has been usable on linux.
Yet the open-source community didn't build anything useful at scale on mono/C#. The C# community has still little to compete with Java when building large scale backend applications. I will love to have alternates to Hadoop, Spark, Kafka and other top Apache projects.
C# could have been much more if Microsoft collaborated with other open-source projects instead of actively fighting and killing them by offering the same functionality natively. All this for having a much tighter control over the ecosystem.
For most of its history, Mono was buggy, lagging behind, and slow. It was only ever a solution of last resort, if you absolutely had to migrate an existing Windows app to another platform.
Microsoft tried to push it a bit once they bought it for cross-platform mobile dev (back when Windows Phone was still a thing), but that never took off to any extent either.
That's news to me. Languages that are close enough to the hardware and allow for inline assembly can probably never be described as slow overall. Perhaps the author refers to some specific libraries?
> Java is the most recent popular general-purpose language
This post was written in 2022. Does the author not know about Python? Javascript? Rust? C#? and a bunch of others?
Weird.