Java Vs. C#: Which Performs Better In the 'Real World'? 437
Nerval's Lobster writes "Software developer Jeff Cogswell writes: 'Let's compare Java and C#, two programming languages with large numbers of ardent fans and equally virulent detractors. I'm not interested in yet another test that grindingly calculates a million digits' worth of Pi. I want to know about real-world performance: How does each language measure up when asked to dish out millions of Web pages a day? How do they compare when having to grab data from a database to construct those pages dynamically? The results were quite interesting.' Having worked as a professional C# programmer for many years, Cogswell found some long-held assumptions challenged."
Language is hardly relevant (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Language is hardly relevant (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason this is interesting, is it's a very simple test, and hows the maximum performance. Requests can never be faster than returning a simple string. CLR + ISS is slower than JVM + Tomcat. Unfortunately, we don't know where exactly the performance difference lies.
Re:Language is hardly relevant (Score:5, Interesting)
It's also interesting to note that all tests were done on Windows. Despite him using Tomcat for Java and IIS for C# because that's the "typical" usage, he then completely does an about-face and deploys the Tomcat on Windows-- a configuration I've actually never seen and which has to give C# a bit of an advantage as the vendor-supplied OS. And yet Java still won when talking about doing anything substantial...
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I also add the tests were run on cloud servers, which is a time share environment.
Also, I would have used TC server instead of tomcat. Or another java enterprise JSP container.
Re:Language is hardly relevant (Score:4, Insightful)
That and the fact that his "simple" test took longer to run than his supposedly more complex test in Java. Something wrong with the first test ? With the second?
Well, something very wrong with the overall test. When your results contradict themselves, you should not publish them.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Language is hardly relevant (Score:5, Informative)
I been a Java developer for 8 years, worked at several different consulting companies and large in-house corporate environments. I've never seen Windows+Tomcat being used in an actual production setup. For development, yes, almost always. But Linux+Tomcat is much more common for live servers in my experience. At least it is in today's business world.
Re:Language is hardly relevant (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Language is hardly relevant (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Language is hardly relevant (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry to burst your bubble, but Pearson is a private company. It is not an academic institution. You can blame this on bureaucracy in large institutions making bad choices, but teachers don't get a say on this stuff. The leadership does.
Re:Language is hardly relevant (Score:5, Informative)
You've never been in education, have you? It shows.
"Educators" are the actual teachers. They have near zero say in what systems get selected, and those doing the selecting seldom have any experience in being an educator, and usually the selection committee ("Committee Decisions: Because you can't fire the committee") is judging the software on features and functionality, not on underlying technology.
If there is someone in a specific educational organization who has specific architectural biases against Windows, I can assure you they have nothing to do with system selection, only implementation.
And what are the VIABLE alternatives? Professionally I've worked with several educational institutions that have made a run at being all Macintosh, and it has always been a dismal and expensive failure on the back end. They all migrated to Windows servers and kept Macs only for teachers and students, if that.
Linux may be viable for some functions, but with most of these things it boils down to dollars. Linux may be "free" but support isn't, and finding people who can support it is expensive for school districts, at least a datacenter level and not a kludged whitebox install level. Maintaining an all-Linux backend usually requires a lot of high level administrative support and the administrators I can guarantee you are looking at COST first THEN functionality and they will ALWAYS see a Microsoft-based solution as inherently cheaper "because we already do that."
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You've never been in education, have you? It shows.
"Educators" are the actual teachers. They have near zero say in what systems get selected, and those doing the selecting seldom have any experience in being an educator, and usually the selection committee ("Committee Decisions: Because you can't fire the committee") is judging the software on features and functionality, not on underlying technology.
If there is someone in a specific educational organization who has specific architectural biases against Windows, I can assure you they have nothing to do with system selection, only implementation.
And what are the VIABLE alternatives? Professionally I've worked with several educational institutions that have made a run at being all Macintosh, and it has always been a dismal and expensive failure on the back end. They all migrated to Windows servers and kept Macs only for teachers and students, if that.
Linux may be viable for some functions, but with most of these things it boils down to dollars. Linux may be "free" but support isn't, and finding people who can support it is expensive for school districts, at least a datacenter level and not a kludged whitebox install level. Maintaining an all-Linux backend usually requires a lot of high level administrative support and the administrators I can guarantee you are looking at COST first THEN functionality and they will ALWAYS see a Microsoft-based solution as inherently cheaper "because we already do that."
Yes I have been in education. Teachers are not the only educators. Most of the administration are educators, too, often with advanced degrees. While I agree that the teachers are not making those decisions, surely the administration is. I was in no way inferring that the teachers are the problem, but, like doctors, most professional educators don't make the best business decisions, probably because those decisions are outside their area of expertise. That's not a condemnation, just an observation.
Re:Language is hardly relevant (Score:5, Insightful)
That's utter nonsense. In reality, Linux is no harder (and probably easier) to maintain than Windows: it's less complicated, its interfaces and tools change less over time, and there are numerous ready-made, turnkey server solutions that you basically just boot up and use. More CS grads will know and will have administered Linux systems than Windows systems because administration for Linux systems is much more similar between single user and multi-user.
School administrators may choose Windows because they believe it's easier to maintain, but they are mistaken.
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Ummmmm, Unix has been the server platform of choice in practically every secondary education institution in the US (one might even say on Earth) since time immemorial. It would be HIGHLY unusual to see anything with "University" in its name running any significant outward-facing IT infrastructure on Windows. Smaller and newer institutions, yes perhaps, but even most colleges that have been around since the 80's are basically Unix shops (and these days are mostly basically Linux shops, though you will still find a decent amount of AIX/Solaris/etc here and there). Not to say that Windows isn't quite common and even prevalent in some niches in the schools I've been associated with, but none of them would have had any difficulty or hesitation in running a line-of-business web application on a *nix platform, and most wouldn't have even thought about using Windows for that unless there was a specific reason for doing so.
They were talking about the public school system K-12.
Re:Language is hardly relevant (Score:5, Funny)
Dueling useless anecdotes.
Re:Language is hardly relevant (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been doing Java development for 15+ years and most of that in web apps. Production deployments to Linux, mainframes, and Windows. Sadly, most often, the production machines are Windows. A typical argument is that it is best to have the production system similar to development (and QA, and integration testing, and user acceptance testing) system to avoid surprises as the build travels through the process.
Concerning portability of Java across platforms, I can only recall having three issues and they are all related to file systems: paths (developer assumption), permissions, and Windows misreporting file creation time. For Java web apps, your portability issues are the same regardless of language--the browsers.
For a true comparison of Java to C#, I can only think of one way to do it. Give four weeks of identical requirements to two teams, one of C# fanbois and one of Java fanbois. Limit them to three development weeks each, and then judge by features completed and application performance. Switch teams and complete the job. Try a larger project to flush out the architecture set up phase and then adjust your results by availability of skilled resources in the market.
Re:Language is hardly relevant (Score:5, Funny)
> I've never seen Windows+Tomcat being used in an actual production setup.
Then you haven't seen shit.
Re:Language is hardly relevant (Score:5, Funny)
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Symantec Endpoint Management uses Tomcat / Java / Windows, as does CrashPlan, Blackberry Enterprise, and probably scores of others. It seems like any time Im dealing with an "enterprisey" service that has some kind of "shiney" web interface, its got tomcat on the backend.
For the record, BES has been tomcat basically forever.
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I've seen Tomcat on Windows a lot. Remember that most Enterprise environments until relatively recently used Windows for everything.
As far as I can remember (at least since 1998) I've almost never seen a Java/Windows-based web-application enterprise environment. I've only seen that twice, and these were for subsets of web apps that were meant to run on laptops that would temporarily be on the field, disconnected from a network.
And before the advent of Java, most enterprise systems were running on a combination of mainframes and minicomputers (the good but now almost forgotten AS400s and their like), and the old UNIX workstations. Win
Re:Language is hardly relevant (Score:4, Informative)
The official Tomcat installer for Windows (as in, the one that you'd download from tomcat.apache.org [apache.org] installs the Tomcat Native Connector, which improves performance considerably. And there's a lot of vertical market applications for Windows that bundle Tomcat.
Re:Language is hardly relevant (Score:4, Insightful)
In the first test, he explicitly mentions going back on his word to use a Linux machine.
The author is clearly not a Java developer, and the second test really calls the first test into question. In the first test, he is having trouble with socket connections, which proved devastating to Java's numbers. Then, he moved onto using ASP.NET versus JSP in the second test, and JSP did significantly better than his simple socket tests in Java.
The simple fact that he did not go back to figure out what was wrong with his first test demonstrates quite clearly that both sets of his results are useless. It should be obvious that he is a weak Java developer--even without seeing the code--and I suspect he is not a particularly strong C# developer either on the basis that he did not question the results.
Re:Language is hardly relevant (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason this is interesting, is it's a very simple test, and hows the maximum performance. Requests can never be faster than returning a simple string. CLR + ISS is slower than JVM + Tomcat. Unfortunately, we don't know where exactly the performance difference lies.
Nope, maybe that's what author think's he's doing, but he clearly doesn't understand the stacks.
For .NET, he's using the entire ASP.NET MVC framework to return a simple string. For Java, he's just using a bare servlet, and no framework code. To make this a fair test, he should be using Spring or something on the Java side.
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Clueless test is clueless. Comparing Apple to Al Quaida to give management advice to system architects..
Technology most commonly is used by what the corporate standard is.
If there isn't one then you choose what your devs are most familiar with.
If you aren't fettered by considerations as these then you choose the plattform with the least cost attached to. Which bloody well isn't anything
Oracle had th
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Re:Language is hardly relevant (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Language is hardly relevant (Score:4, Informative)
Overall, I'd say the test showed that the author doesn't know how to benchmark.
IIS sucks pure and simple. Even on Windows I use Apache. It's just better.
But I also noticed, he spent a lot of time and effort 'breaking the rules' to make Java better, and working to make it more efficient, but he didn't do that for C#.
So we have... Java's raw implementation is slower than C#s
But when combined with a server, Java Tomcat (still Linux? Or is it back to Windows) is faster than C# on IIS/Windows.
No shit shirlock, really? Might as well add Python and ModWSGI on Apache then. Have, what is usually regarded as the performance king, in the comparison.
I think just about everyone knows, performance wise with the same hardware, a server will be faster on about any *NIX but MacOS (and probably even that) than Windows.
I think just about everyone ALSO knows that IIS is a steaming pile, and Apache is pretty damn good (IIRC TomCat is built on Apache).
Now, if we compare the raw tests (C# vs Java) C# is faster, but when we move to the web servers, suddenly Java is better. That tells me... IIS is significantly (orders of magnitude) worse than Tomcat/Apache.
That wasn't news a decade ago.
And this is article longer a comparison of Java/C#
Re:Language is hardly relevant (Score:4, Informative)
But I also noticed, he spent a lot of time and effort 'breaking the rules' to make Java better, and working to make it more efficient, but he didn't do that for C#.
It is clear that he is a Java novice and he admits so much. He failed to do it right, both his version of HttpServer and his ServerSocket are WRONG.
HttpServer needs to be configured with a thread pool. If you fail to do that, it will run single threaded. And it is clear that is exactly what happened.
ServerSocket is the old network API from the first version of Java. It was build with the idea of "one thread for each connection". Therefore all IO calls are blocking because you are supposed to run them in threads. ServerSocket has an accept call that will block until the next connection. You are then supposed to start a new thread (or use a thread pool) and let the new thread handle the new connection. He clearly failed to do that, instead he made a single threaded implementation.
Modern Java frameworks use NIO - the new network IO for Java. This has non-blocking IO calls and allows much faster processing. It is also much harder to use on a low level, which is why most developers never do that.
All of this explains why he is suddenly having much more luck when he switches to Tomcat. This takes him away from the low level stuff that he is doing wrong. Tomcat will do the IO correctly, it will use threads. It will AFAIK not use NIO however. But just doing it right using threads will give him a speed up of order of magnitudes.
Conclusion: He was not spending a lot of time and effort on making Java better. He was trying to learn Java. Too bad that he failed. Great that he moved on to easier higher level Java.
Re:Language is hardly relevant (Score:4, Informative)
Unfortunately, we don't know where exactly the performance difference lies.
The test details are very, very light (some code would've been nice). However, just looking at the details we have, I see two issues with the C# testing in test #2 -
1) The tests were pushed through the MVC4 Framework - this is an additional layer of unneeded overhead and processing for the C# tests. It's not mentioned if the Java requests were piped through an MVC engine.
2) "I can have a servlet return some HTML, or I can return the results of a JSP page. These are analogous to the C# controller and View approaches, respectively." - This is incorrect. Servlets would be analogous to writing an HTTP Module, and JSP would be the equivalent to writing an ASPX page/HTTP Handler.
These two problems probably stem from the author's unfamiliarity with C# on IIS outside of an MVC environment.
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Perhaps this just shows that you can't just think about your language you might actually have to spend a few minutes thinking about the platform you'll run on. Don't throw it on Tomcat just because that is the first java server you find or IIS because it comes in the box.
But ultimately at any sort of scale you are going to have redundant web servers, data servers, caching nodes etc. This is like testing how quickly the gas pedal goes down on the latest Porche when the engine, tires, transmission etc all hav
Re:Language is hardly relevant (Score:5, Funny)
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Language is hardly relevant (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Language is hardly relevant (Score:5, Funny)
At my company we travel back it time and tweak the early universe to give the appropriate settings in the present day. It's currently optimised for cat videos which is probably why your settings aren't working.
Re:Language is hardly relevant (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Language is hardly relevant (Score:5, Interesting)
No, that's not fine tuned enough. Standard practice here is to program an FPGA to do the less important work, with wire wrapped transistors doing anything that needs to perform well.
Anything less is, well, lazy.
From what (little) I know, that's exactly what data warehouse appliances like Netezza and Teradata do. They have custom built FPGAs to do the SQL execution significantly faster than what a CPU can do.
Re:Language is hardly relevant (Score:4, Interesting)
Assembly is the only way to go when it comes to database oriented web apps.
This is what I find funny about C++ zealots who hate .NET and java. Interestingly enough, Microsoft had an incubating effort to build a "framework" called Casablanca that would give C++ developers an easy way to host a web server or a RESTful web service. Part of the C++11 standard is incorporating features in languages like C# and java. It's interesting to watch the pendulum shift back and forth and the philosophical arguments being argued from ivory towers.
Re:Language is hardly relevant (Score:4, Funny)
No-no-no. The only way to write databse-oriented web apps is surely PL/SQL [oracle.com]!
Re:Language is hardly relevant (Score:5, Insightful)
C# 5.0 (the latest version) has language-integrated async functionality that makes writing vertically scalable software a snap. It looks and behaves almost exactly like sync code, but actually runs async. Talking about server-side async here, not client-side.
Doing the same thing with Java or an older version of C#, where you have only the base libraries to help you, is really quite tedious to do properly.
So, for a test like this involving web development, I'd say language is actually a pretty relevant topic. Unless you've got lots of money to spend and can throw more hardware at something, the kind of perf improvement that can be provided by this is pretty astounding.
But, there are problems with this test. He says explicitly that he's looking for a real-world test, but then goes and basically times a Hello World. There is no database access, no concurrent users. No real-world anything.
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You do realize that Java is one of the fastest languages on the planet, right? And unlike C#, it's fast on many different operating systems.
Re:Language is hardly relevant (Score:4, Insightful)
This is Sun we're talking about, now Oracle; they were the original planet weird when it came to implementing programming languages. Swing is one of the few things I've seen leave programmers speechless with frustration.
Plus Oracle has been doing so well with their JREs that even DHS has recommended disabling their plugins lately.
Re:Language is hardly relevant (Score:4, Interesting)
Swing is one of the few things I've seen leave programmers speechless with frustration.
umm what? as much as a pain as layouts can be to get things to do what you want, swing was still really well done and is incredibly flexible and versatile. I'd hardly call swing something form planet weird. And having worked with solaris/sunos some, it's really well done as well. Honestly, saying sun was from planet weird is just... weird to me :P
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Swing is one of the few things I've seen leave programmers speechless with frustration.
I see you've never used Motif. Direct use of Xlib is nicer and less frustrating than Motif. Heck, personally whistling the X protocol down a telephone line connected to a 300 baud modem would probably be better than Motif. Did I mention that I really disliked Motif, and think that no matter how much GTK and Qt are idiotic, they still do a better job?
Swing's main problem was that every single one of the layout managers was crap (and writing a good one is genuinely hard, though that's actually not a Java prob
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Swing is one of the few things I've seen leave programmers speechless with frustration.
Wow, you must not have done anything with MFC.
Re:Language is hardly relevant (Score:5, Funny)
If you measure efficiency in terms of average revenue per line of code, it's hard to beat MS. I mean, look at Vista, it was a single line of code calling bluescreen.bmp and it made them millions.
Re:Language is hardly relevant (Score:4, Informative)
Threading is a form of async, but not the one I meant.
I was referring to async I/O, where you can request the OS perform some I/O and then notify you when it's complete without blocking any of your threads. This enables you to write apps with co-operative multitasking where you switch between tasks while you wait for I/O, which is far more efficient than switching between threads.
With this model you can (somewhat) easily service 10,000 clients per-thread.
Typically this form of async is done using callbacks or eventing, which is doable with some practice but creates code which is really gnarly to anyone lacking experience with async. .NET has supported this form of async for many years, and I believe Java's NIO library provides the same thing.
C# 5.0 takes it a step further and gives an incredibly useful syntax sugar -- basically hiding all the callbacks, making it look like a simple synchronous method. Behind the scenes, the C# compiler generates a state machine class that does all the heavy lifting.
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We have the @Asynchronous annotation in Java 6 that pretty much does the same thing.
http://docs.oracle.com/javaee/6/api/javax/ejb/Asynchronous.html [oracle.com]
It is actually pretty nifty.
Re:Language is hardly relevant (Score:5, Informative)
We have the @Asynchronous annotation in Java 6 that pretty much does the same thing.
No it does not do "pretty much the same thing". Not even close.
To start with, the @Asynchronous annotation is for EJB session beans only.
C# async is a generalized async capability baked into the language. C# async works with disk IO, network IO, threads or anything else that follows one of several async patterns.
The big boon with async compared to task based parallelism (on which C# async is based) comes from the capability to write the code in a pseudo-sequential form and (not least) the ability to *compose* async tasks.
Think about how you handle exceptions in a flow of, say, 3 async calls. Without language support for async you have to register callbacks or futures which will execute once the previous task completes. How would you go about defining an exception handler that covers all 3 calls? You can't; not without some serious wrangling with closures and state machines.
Now think about how you would create a loop over async task #2. You cannot span a single while loop across the task call because the task will call back to a continuation function which syntactically needs to be *outside* the loop.
Now combine the loop with the exception handler. In Java this gets so unwieldy that it is next to impossible. In C# it is trivially easy and reads like sequential code:
try{
var res1 = await FirstAsync();
while(someCondition) {
await SecondAsync(res1);
}
var res3 = await ThirdAsync(res1)
} catch (SomeException ex) {
}
GP is correct, the async continuations is C# are pretty unique at this point.
Re:Language is hardly relevant (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless you're running Facebook or Twitter, the odds are that you don't really need to be asking questions like this. The bottlenecks you encounter are more likely to be poor code within your codebase than anything intrinsic about the language.
If you are running a site like Facebook that needs to scale beyond what that platform can realistically cope with, and your codebase is perfect and can't be made any faster, then it may be more feasible to do what Facebook did with PHP and fix the platform, rather than to switch to something different as that would involve rewriting your entire codebase, at which point you no longer have "perfect" code any more, and you lose the benefits of your dev team's existing skillset.
But very few of us are ever going to be in that position. Facebook did what the needed to do given the circumstances, but the rest of us should just concentrate on improving our own code before criticising the platform we're using.
Bottom line: If you write decent code, it doesn't matter what language it's in; all the major platforms are perfectly capable of running a high traffic web site. Conversely badly written code can and will bring even the most resiliant of servers to its knees. It's all about your code, not about the platform.
Anyone who tells you otherwise and says "language X isn't capable of doing that" is being a language snob. Feel free to ignore them.
Re:Caching (Score:4, Interesting)
At which point, you have two choices: use a compiled language, or use an interpreted byte code language like Java or C#.
Neither Java nor C# are interpreted on heavy loads, they both JIT-compile, and they both have options (third-party) to compile to native code ahead of time.
The difference in performance between C++ and Java/C# has nothing to do with bytecode, and everything with their semantics. Their object model requires a GC - that's extra overhead. Their arrays are always bounds-checked - overhead. Class instances are always allocated on the heap (except for C# structs, which are rather limited in what they can do) - overhead. And so on.
They are both as good (Score:5, Insightful)
I've used both and really haven't seen issue with either. I have a slight preference for C#, personally, but it all comes down to your design, architecture, and implementation that will slow you down.
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And whether you prefer Visual Studio's IDE, or Eclipse.
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So does emacs. (vi!!!!)
something something something LAWN!
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Eclipse is much more user-friendly and stable than NetBeans in every iteration I have used it.
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Eclipse is much more user-friendly and stable than NetBeans in every iteration I have used it.
Most problems people have with Eclipse are due to crap plugins. If you pile a bunch of plugins into it, it will run like a dog.
Re:They are both as good (Score:5, Insightful)
NetBeans does a better job of exposing the functionality you need, though the extensibility is more limited (like vi or nano).
Re:They are both as good (Score:4, Interesting)
That is interesting, my experience is completely opposite -- Netbeans is better focused on most often used functionality than on some niche stuff and extreme configurability almost noone needs, has shorter menus, less cluttered toolbars, has more intelligent and intuitive text editor (variable names guessing is so brilliant you don't notice it until you go back to other editors), has Alt-Tab that works instantly, etc. etc.
It is also periodically reviewed for performance and tuned up, which results in amazing improvements between, say, version 6.5 and 7.2.
Netbeans doesn't require me to get and configure additional plugins for SVN or Maven. It is much better integrated with application servers.
etc, etc
Have you tried Netbeans recently, or do you base your Eclipse preference on Netbeans 3.5? Because I have been forced to use Eclipse Juno for past 3 months and it is slow as hell, unintuitive, has menus that still require scrolling in full hd and still proposes arg0 as variable names...
Does it matter. (Score:5, Insightful)
I personally would expect one to win in some regards and the other to win in others. My concern is that C# is too tightly bound to MS platforms. Java isn't perfect, it isn't the write once run everywhere that was promised, but the port from Java on MS to Java on Linux, Mac ... will most certainly be better.
That is enough that I would prefer Java over C# on my projects. Of course there are always outside parameters that might be enough to tip the scale.
Re:Does it matter. (Score:5, Interesting)
On the other hand, C#'s syntax has ruined java for me. Many simple tasks in java feel like they take 3 times as many steps as they need to: e.g. overloading a method with an optional bool defaulting to false requires actually writing a new overload and passing the default. To be fair, there are times when python or a functional language makes C# feel the same way, but java is just too far removed on the convenience factor for me.
Re:Does it matter. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yeah, while I'm not a fan of being entirely bound to MS (though thanks to Mono that's not as much of an issue as it could be), C# just feels so much more modern than Java. Just having an actual event structure instead of passing through all sorts of hoops is refreshing, and then things like lambda functions, LINQ, extension methods and all that. No, none of it is essential, but it's mighty convenient and it also makes the code a lot more readable, which in my opinion is a much more important metric for wort
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[Java] isn't the write once run everywhere that was promised
I've been writing Java apps that run on Linux and Windows for a long time, and have yet to run into this. Can you give an example where using pure Java doesn't work the same across platforms?
A question? (Score:4, Insightful)
I have seen it often said that when a slashdot headline ends in a question mark then the answer is no.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
I have seen it often said that when a slashdot headline ends in a question mark then the answer is no.
Maybe I should create a programming language, call it "no", and then submit a Slashdot story "What is the best programming language around?" :-)
Re:A question? (Score:4, Insightful)
Not just slashdot, but you're right: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Next up: Is Betteridge's law always right?
Errors on big sites (Score:2)
Now on smaller sites I see PHP crashes but I would expect to see more pe
source: experience (Score:2, Informative)
C# programmers get paid more.
Just do it all in C++ (Score:5, Informative)
Before I get modded troll, I'd like to point out that there is a really awesome C++ toolkit for web development and it will blow your mind. It's called Wt and it makes your applications fully OOP and a joy to develop in. One really awesome feature is that it is Boosted and another awesome feature is smart with regard to data. It will use where apropriate (usually you use the AJAX version of a control or mark a function for export to javascript) AJAX rather than statically filling your page. The result are some really easy to code fast websites.
These tests were also simple (Score:5, Insightful)
These tests were also just as simple as calculating Pi a thousand times. Based on the description, I was hoping for some tests where a website with a dozen or so complete views with significant bindings were created in both Java and C#. Instead it was just an HTTP request or a page that printed the date.
Different frameworks and web servers are going to use varying amounts of overhead, so simple tests really only calculate that overhead. If you are going to provide benchmarks that actually have some meaning then they need to test complex enough behavior to mimic real world usage.
These tests basically just show that Tomcat is faster than IIS for simple scenarios, or perhaps that ASP.NET MVC 4 adds more overhead to page requests than JSP does. Whether this overhead is meaningful when you are processing rich real world web pages is not covered by these tests.
Re:These tests were also simple (Score:4, Insightful)
Frankly, the obvious problem (from somebody who has done a bit of both JSP and ASP.NET development) is the use of the MVC framework on IIS, and nothing even remotely equivalent on Java. If this were going to be as close to an apples-to-apples test as possible, you'd use bare ASP.NET (a single .ASPX page, possibly with a code-behind .cs file) and a single .JSP page.
I don't even think it's a matter of the author of the article having any agenda or something... I think he just honestly doesn't understand how to use the frameworks. For a very roughly analogous example from another programming domain, if I want to display a line of text on the terminal, I print a line of text. I don't go pull up the ncurses library and use it to create a one-line-tall TUI into which I create a label containing my text and then immediately exit. That would be... well, about as smart as using a heavyweight MVC framework to produce a web page containing the current time.
Re: (Score:3)
So, get cracking. What's stopping you from doing the test yourself and publish the results?
My current area of research is in automated database design, and there are only so many hours in the day. My own tests have shown that C# using LINQ performs better for me than either Java or even my best attempts at C++, but these personal experiments are nowhere near publishable. They likely only show that I am more proficient at C#. But that was good enough for me since my objective was to see what language I should be doing my own experiments in right now, not in a fantasy world where I had enough ti
Summary of TFA (Score:2)
C#/CLR is much quicker when directly responding to HTTP requests; Java/JVM is a bit quicker when going through the popular web servers / stacks Tomcat and IIS.
Which is better bad or worse? (Score:3)
The question is would you like to be hung or firing squad neither of them is very good.
Re:Which is better bad or worse? (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
I think that statement requires additional qualification.
The colloquial extremes I have heard are "well hung" and "hung like a budgie".
If you want sheer performance.... (Score:2)
However choice of programming language has a lot to do with what you want to do.
If you want to create jobs to processing millions of records locally, C/C++ would be better.
If you want to have secure web based jobs, Java would be better.
If you want to create Windows GUI applications, C# would be better.
Basically its horses for courses.
Nothing to see here (Score:5, Insightful)
Where to start complaining? Don't roll your own http server. You probably don't understand what you are doing, and you will get weird results. Using Windows as a platform for a java web server is pretty silly. The author incorrectly assumes that because the
Summary: (Score:5, Informative)
Test 2: A function to generate a "full web site", (actually a simple web page with all the elements and trivial content). Java beats C# hands down.
Conclusion:
1. The testing guy has absolutely no idea of how to write low level function efficiently.
2. The testing guy's idea of a "full web site" is woe fully inadequate. He could have been the guy designing "full continental breakfast" in Roach Motel Inc.
I don't like the premise. (Score:4, Insightful)
"Real World?" If we're all not in the real world then we must be living in imaginary space then. Seriously, I see the C#/Java thing coming down to a matter of enterprise choice vs. performance of the language. You'll find big shops running WebSphere/Weblogic and those running JBoss to deploy enterprise apps. There's still a lot of folks deploying with tomcat, which is a great tool. Microsoft has done well over the past few years in improving IIS / .NET scalability where it now can compete with Java EE deployments. 5 years ago you couldn't say that but now the differences are becoming more narrow. I like Java and use it. I like C# and use it as well. My biggest concerns with both is that largely, they're in the hands of two very large vendors. Java has at least more open push on it but again, Larry Ellison will dictate largely what happens to Java and IMO he'll milk it for every penny he can get. C#/.NET not only sells OS licenses for MSFT but it also gets used as a toy as well.
It would be really nice I guess if both of these were truly in the public domain as to prohibit Oracle and MSFT from having direct control over how the languages evolve and are licensed.
c# vs java (Score:2)
I thought the main reason to use java was to be OS independent. When your web page on Linux couldn't handle the load you could just move your code to a bigger Solaris or IBM box. Or when the PHB says he doesn't trust BSD to be secure he can move it all to Windows.
I've not worked with c#. Is it multiplatform like java or are you stuck with running it on Windows?
Terrible story...wtf editors? (Score:2)
What a bunch of... words. (Score:3)
Choosing a Language (Score:5, Insightful)
In short, the Microsoft fanboys avoid more Linux-favored languages (and don't even think about Apple languages); Apple fanboys avoid more Microsoft-favored languages; and Linux fanboys avoid more patent-encumbered, closed-source languages and ones requiring to purchase an IDE/etc. for development. All fanboys avoid what they perceive as "diseased languages" like the plague. However, they will still touch these diseased language every now and then because either they have to for a job or out of pure curiosity.
Being a Linux fanboy, C# is my bubonic plague. This is also in part growing up using Microsoft Visual Studio 6 for C++. For the haters, I actually loved this IDE, but then I found out that none of my code would work on other platforms or even other compilers with Win32 such as Borland++, g++, etc. (we all remember how a variable in a for-loop wouldn't be contained to just that block... terrible). And then when exploring other languages/environments, I couldn't believe my eyes when I could actually see library-level source code -- you have no idea how useful this is. Even though I'll admit that Microsoft has gotten a little better about this (although they still tried to spread FUD using the DroidRage campaign), it's not worth it to me. They've already lost my faith in them as a customer, and I can't see myself ever returning.
Now, a good study would be to remove all of this and determine what languages are either faster to code in, easier to debug/maintain/extend with enterprise-level code, or more readable. But would this study even be useful? The differences would be so minute. Scripting languages are going to be faster to code in, so what's the fastest scripting language to code in? Object-oriented languages will be the easiest to debug/maintain/extend. As for readability, who knows? It's so subjective. We'd have to get a large, random sample size of people that have never seen a programming language before.
Having said all of this, I still appreciate this guy doing the study. Apache has always made top-quality code, and it's good to see that TomCat lives up to it.
Finally, as for sheer speed (and needs to be at least easier than assembly), C will always win.
Who cares? (Score:3, Interesting)
So what if there is a 25% different in performance? Hardware is cheap. Software maintenance, administration, and licensing is expensive. The most compelling reason to use Java is that I can run it on Linux. That means I can clone VMs for development and testing, copy OS installations, and ship VMs to customers and resellers without having to spend time and money on licensing and activation. It makes development, testing, and deployment easier to automate when possible and hack when necessary for the small guys that don't have volume license agreements. .NET isn't the problem. Windows is.
Neither (Score:3)
I ran a similar test like this when I was having performance troubles with one of my QA apps.
I had written it in C# because I was bored and wanted to explore the language a little bit. I ran into issues with threading and performance when ramping up TCP connections and data processing.
I did a line-by-line rewrite into C++ (seriously, I copied the source and translated each line)....and all my performance problems went away.
In my experience, both Java and C# are easy to write, but abysmal when it comes to performance.
Judging a language by outcomes (Score:3)
While not very fair I've always tended to judge languages by their outcomes in terms of usability. From freeware utilities to products from large vendors, to websites using certain three letter extensions there have been certain recurring themes I have noticed throughout the years. Perhaps it is all expectation bias or a reflection of the culture of people who would use certain tools.. I won't pretend to know.
Is it fair to blaim PHP for SQL injection vulnerabilities found in PHP apps?
Is it fair to blame Java when an application outputs a stack trace and keeps on truckin as if nothing just happened?
Is it fair to blame Java when an application is as slow as a drunk snail or consumes mind boggling amounts of memory?
I think in the aggregate it might be possible to make the case for the quality of a programming language based on certain properties of a large sample of resulting programs.
What is the most interesting to me is the disconnect in effort spent by language designers to produce these modern languages and actual resulting outcomes. Why is ancient C(++) still soo popular and what gets used to write all of the core software? Why do we still have operating systems, network stacks and web browsers built in C when we have all of these superior languages with all of their holier than thou ivory tower labled features?
When is a _general purpose_ language going to come along that actually enables people to get amazing results which would not otherwise be feasible without the use of said language?
Who wouldn't cringe if they found out the latest version of their favorite browser had been rewritten in Java or .NET? In my view all TFA is doing is comparing the realitive intelligence of two mentally challenged competitors. I actually like both languages...NET somewhat more than Java. I just tend to not like the resulting program that comes out the other end.
Duh. (Score:4, Insightful)
Well gee, let's see. I can definitely say that C# programs do not perform as well on OSX, Linux, or IBM I.
Re:Which one is the bigger security threat? (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
The last line of the article I read was...
Meanwhile, Java is the clear winner here.
...or did I miss a link?
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
It's a trap to try and make us look at TFA.
Re: (Score:3)
The C# runtime doesn't interpret bytecode. It's all JITted before execution. Always.
Re:are they serious right now? (Score:5, Insightful)
Open Office is slow as hell.
Repeat after me: Open Office is not written in Java, though it uses Java for some optional features. Yon don't even need Java installed to run Open Office, and disabling Java does reduce Open Office startup time since it no longer needs to start the JVM.
But it's a good meme to keep repeating, because when someone says 'Java sucks because Open Office is slow' and they're not talking about startup time, it's a very good indication that they have no clue.
Re: (Score:3)
If you think Reflection usage is bad in ASP.NET MVC, you've obviously never seen Spring...
Also, the "whatever Java has" above is "nothing" because the idiot tested a bare JSP running on Tomcat vs. a ASPX running on top of the entire MVC framework on top of IIS. Yeah, no wonder the perf is going to suck; that's a huge amount of completely wasted overhead. IIS can serve a dynamic ASPX page without any of that MVC garbage just fine, thank you... and with that, get rid of all the Reflection and so forth that, w
Re: (Score:3)
Good thing neither of the languages being discussed is in any way interpreted, or has been for a decade or so (actually, never in the official C#/.NET distribution).
But it's OK, I'm sure that somewhere under that mouth froth you actually know what you're talking about on some subject or other. Just keep searching, you'll find it eventually.
Re:Aspects... (Score:4, Insightful)
Um, no. You could probably write an entire office suite in perl and have it fit onto a few small pieces of paper when printed out; but nobody would ever understand it, probably not even the person who wrote it in the first place!
Re: (Score:3)
They used to be mostly the same language, but that was somewhere circa 1.0. C# has developed much faster since then, and has a lot of things that have no direct equivalent in Java, like yield, lambdas, LINQ, dynamic or async/await.