C++, Java and .NET: Lessons Learned from the Internet Age

Today at TSSJS, I attended Cameron Purdy's keynote titled C++, Java and .NET: Lessons learned from the Internet Age, and What it means for the Cloud and Emerging Languages.

His talk was a retrospective of the trade-offs compared to C++ illustrated by Java, C# and other VM-based programming languages with Garbage-Collection, scripting languages simultaneously thrived, and what this teaches us about the applicability of technology to emerging challenges and environments such as cloud computing. Why did Java become so successful? Some folks say it was marketed better, but it was Sun - so we know that could've have been possible.

Cameron is the VP of Development for Oracle Fusion Middleware, responsible for the Coherence Data Grid product which has Java, C# and C++ versions. Data Grids are RAID for servers. It provides a reliable data tier with a single, consistent view of data and enabled dynamic data capacity including fault tolerance and load balancing. The servers cooperate together and act as an organism to manage their information.

Java when it first came out very much looked like evolution. From a C++ programmers perspective, Java was bloated.

Below are Cameron's Top 10 Reasons Why Java has been able to supplant C++. This started happening around 1996-97. Warning to Language Fanbois: Yes, I know there are 3rd party GC implementations that fix some of these issues.

10. Automated Garbage Collection: A significant portion of C++ code is dedicated to memory management. This meant faster time to market and lower bug count.

9. The Build Process: C++ builds are slow and complicated. Personal example: 20 hour full build in C++ compared to 7 minutes in Java.

8. Simplicity of Source Code and Artifacts: C++ splits source into header and implementation files. Artifacts are compiler-specific, but there are many of them. With Java, there's just one .java and just one .class.

7. Binary Standard: In addition to being loadable as a class by a JVM, a Java classfile can be used to compile against. Java defers platform-specific stuff to the runtime.

6. Dynamic Linking: No standard way to dynamically link classes in C++.

5. Portability: Java is portable with very little effort; C++ is portable in theory, but in practice you have to build another language (#ifdef'd types, etc.) on top of it. C++ has significant differences from vendor to vendor. Some unnamed major vendors have horrid support for the C++ standard, particularly templates.

4. Standard Type System: Java has specified, portable primitive types. C++ still has a hard time defining what a String is. Multi-threading? You must be joking. STL? Maybe some day. Basically nothing is standard!

3. Reflection: Full runtime capability to look at the runtime. C++ has optional RTTI, but no reflection. Enables extremely powerful generic frameworks. It gives you the ability to learn about, access and manipulate any object.

2. Performance: GC can make memory management much more efficient (slab allocators, escape analysis). This is because of modern architectures and the fact that Java can take advantage of multiple threads. Thread safe smart pointers in C++ are 3x slower than Java references. Hotspot can do massive inlining, which is very important for dealing with layers of virtual invocation.

1. Safety: Elimination of pointers (arbitrary memory access, ability to easily crash the process). With Java, there's no buffer overruns; code and data cannot be accidentally missed.

Honorable Mention: C++ Templates. Next time someone complains about Java Generics, make them read C++ Templates. They're fugly and extremely bloated.

The Top 10 list of advantages C++ has over Java:

10. Startup Time: The graph of initially loaded class in Java is pretty large. Conclusion: Not good for "instant" and short-running processes.

9. Memory Footprint: Java uses significantly more memory than C++, particularly for "small" applications.

8. Full GC Pauses: Sooner or later, there is a part of GC that can't be run in the background and can't be avoided. This causes havoc for distributed processes and things like real-time financial systems.

7. No Deterministic Destruction: No support for RAII. Cannot count on finalizers. There's not even a "using" construct in Java.

6. Barriers to Native Integration: Operating Systems are built in C/C++. APIs are typically in C.

And that's all Cameron could come up with. Turns out it was only a top 5 list.

So why did the shift from C++ to Java and C# happen? Because Shift Happens. First of all, Al Gore built this internet thing and the World Wide Web. We built a couple browsers with C++, but then we were done. Oh wait, we needed a web server too, so we built Apache. What about the other things? The things that run in the browser? There was no way we were going to run C++ in the browser b/c it was too unsafe. All the advantages that C++ had over Java didn't matter on the web. Startup time wasn't a concern when we left our app server running for months. Memory wasn't an issue because we had GB of RAM on our machines.

What about scripting languages? All the areas where C++ might have an advantage, scripting languages jumped in. They offered simplicity and approachability (hooks up to database, manages state on behalf of the user, produces HTML), rapid application development (no OO architectural requirements, save and refresh).

So what about cloud computing? Can we take what we learned from Java and C++ and apply them to what we see coming down the pipe now with cloud computing? What are we missing? What are the advantages that Java would be missing in a cloud environment?

The things missing from the VM: modularity, lifecycle and isolation. Lower memory footprint and predictable GC pauses. Things missing from the platform: distributed system as a system, provisioning and metering, cloud operating systems APIs, persistence (including key/value) and Map/Reduce-style processing. Finally, the application definition is missing packaging, resource declaration and security in a shared environment.

What's changed in the world since Java was introduced? Hardware virtualization, stateful grid infrastructure and capacity on demand ISPs (EC2). What's coming in Java? Modularization, NIO pluggable file systems, JVM Bare Metal and Virtual Editions. Conclusion: Java either steps up or something else will.

This was an enjoyable talk to listen to and I very much enjoyed Cameron's humor and slide pictures that supported it. As Dusty said, Cameron has a pretty clear picture of what the Java Roadmap should look like. Let's hope Oracle is listening.