1843 options is too many. You could never even consider all of the possible combinations and interactions, let alone test them.
I have really come to appreciate modern opinionated tooling like gofmt, that does not come with hundreds to thousands of knobs.
tezza•42m ago
How is this different to system tuning parameters in Linux /proc, FreeBsd, Windows Registry, Firefox about:config, sockopt, ioctl, postgres?
Zillions of options. Some important, some not
mzi•40m ago
One of my nerd-quizzes I hade at interviews before was "what letters in what case are NOT flags to GNU ls".
deepsun•40m ago
Just because you have more features and way to use them. Say I like to use a different garbage collector for a tool.
RadiozRadioz•27m ago
I don't think modernity is a noteworthy factor as to whether tooling is opinionated.
elric•12m ago
In what way is gofmt remotely comparable to a JVM?
In reality the number of options is significantly smaller than the 1843 you mentioned. The list contains boatloads of duplicates because they exist for multiple architectures. E.g. BackgroundCompilation is present on 8 lines on the OpenJDK 25 page: aarch64, arm, ppc, riscv, s390, x86 and twice more without an architecture.
tomaytotomato•12m ago
It's a result of Java being required to run on many different OS environments (Oracle, Redhat, Windows, RISC/ARM/x86), along with user constraints and also business requirements.
In a way you can use this list of JVM options to illustrate how successful Java has become, that everyone needs an option to get it to work how they like it.
As a Java dev, I have maybe used about 10-15 of them in my career.
The weirdest/funnest one I used was for an old Sun Microsystems Solaris server which ran iPlanet, for a Java EE service.
Since this shared resources with some other back of office systems, it was prone to run out of memory.
Luckily there was a JVM option to handle this!
-XX:OnOutOfMemoryError="<run command>"
It wasn't too important so we just used to trigger it to restart the whole machine, and it would come back to life. Sometimes we used to mess about and get it to send funny IRC messages like "Immah eaten all your bytez I ded now, please reboot me"
guusbosman•42m ago
There is a 2nd edition now of the Optimizing Java book you are referring to on your site.
Hendrikto•50m ago
I have really come to appreciate modern opinionated tooling like gofmt, that does not come with hundreds to thousands of knobs.
tezza•42m ago
Zillions of options. Some important, some not
mzi•40m ago
deepsun•40m ago
RadiozRadioz•27m ago
elric•12m ago
In reality the number of options is significantly smaller than the 1843 you mentioned. The list contains boatloads of duplicates because they exist for multiple architectures. E.g. BackgroundCompilation is present on 8 lines on the OpenJDK 25 page: aarch64, arm, ppc, riscv, s390, x86 and twice more without an architecture.
tomaytotomato•12m ago
In a way you can use this list of JVM options to illustrate how successful Java has become, that everyone needs an option to get it to work how they like it.
As a Java dev, I have maybe used about 10-15 of them in my career.
The weirdest/funnest one I used was for an old Sun Microsystems Solaris server which ran iPlanet, for a Java EE service.
Since this shared resources with some other back of office systems, it was prone to run out of memory.
Luckily there was a JVM option to handle this!
-XX:OnOutOfMemoryError="<run command>"
It wasn't too important so we just used to trigger it to restart the whole machine, and it would come back to life. Sometimes we used to mess about and get it to send funny IRC messages like "Immah eaten all your bytez I ded now, please reboot me"