And most of the newer Java stuff is syntactic sugar, so I’m not sure why that commenter is calling out JVM implementations. I’m guessing they don’t know much about the JVM, since you can compile these higher level syntax tricks down into bytecode just like you might compile more verbose source code.

Static analysis of compiled code with javap might be more difficult, but I’m betting the commenter doesn’t know what that is either.

[–] nik9000 1 points 7 months ago

I think the last new instruction the JVM added was invokedynamic like 10 years ago. I believe they did it so lambdas could be called efficiently. Polymorphic incline cache and stuff.

But the JVM has grown more complex in other ways. The way to force simd instructions is pretty wild, for example.

I don't know enough to call it a mess or not. It works though.