Java > Scala

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Friday, December 02, 2011 10:44:27 Don wrote:
> On 01.12.2011 18:12, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> > On 12/1/11 3:38 AM, Regan Heath wrote:
> >> I think one reason for the movement toward Java and JVM style
> >> languages
> >> is that hardware is getting cheaper and cheaper, and developers cost
> >> the
> >> same or more.
> > 
> > Well, that trend may be stalling.
> > 
> > Andrei
> 
> The cheaper hardware, or the expensive developers?

The hardware. Essentially, we're running into more situations where energy and 
machine costs exceed developer costs (e.g. server farms) or where performance 
matters more than developer costs due to more restrictive hardware (e.g. 
smartphones). Java and JVM style languages favor developer productivity - 
which is one of the reasons that they've been used so heavily over the past 
decade or so - but in those situations where performance and resource 
utilization are much more critical, more performant languages - such as C++ - 
are better.

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/C-and-Beyond-2011-Herb-Sutter-Why-C

Of course, if D is performant enough, it potentially manages to be both 
performant enough for such situations _and_ highly productive for developers. 
But given the various issues and complaints with regards to GC performance and 
unnecessary heap allocations, I'm not sure that it's really there yet unless 
you go out of your way to avoid the GC. Hopefully, we'll get there though.

- Jonathan M Davis