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Ironically they are now an OpenJDK contributor.
https://www.microsoft.com/openjdk
And Java is the only ecosystem that tends to have 1:1 parity with .NET APIs on Azure.
Maybe Google will one day come around with their Android Java flavour as well.
I think it's the core, the 2D engine, just never got the love it needed to be a great place to start. Nobody seemed to prioritize making that happen.
Like, the antialiasing was noticably fuzzy. I never found an applet that looked like it belonged on the webpage. And when I built a few, it was a lot of work to even get font rendering to not be horrendous. And even then, you'd see what the browser rendered vs what the applet rendered and they were always off. I remember using images instead of font rendering sometimes.
So, if you made a swing app, it was easy to put together, but hard to make look "professional".
By the time of the Oracle acquisition, I'm pretty sure everyone just realized "the browser won" and that's why we just had JavaFX get broken off the platform and basically put out to pasture. But it's not like much went into the core platform itself to make building great UIs easy. The underlying 2D rendering just never worked efficiently.
I mean, even today, there's some serious performance issues with IntelliJ on 4k monitors with scaling. https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JBR-526
When I look at where JetBrains is going, it sure seems like they are building on top of a better 2D engine, in this case, skia: https://github.com/JetBrains/skija.
> Both Scala and Kotlin are sufficiently similiar to Java to provide no real benefit
Sorry but "no real benefit" seems to come from a position of ignorance.
I can only talk about Scala which I know pretty well.
While Clojure is a radical departure from Java, being a Lisp, Scala is a departure thanks to its type system and features that help you writing more functional (as in functional programming) code. And I mean this in a good way: it helps you avoid mutations and side-effects, while giving you the freedom to use good old OOP if you wish so. In general it provides tools that help you better express your intent that Java doesn't have.
I think that Java has too much baggage to ever become as good as Scala, especially on the type system side, and, in addition, Scala is also moving forward.
Also don't forget Scala.js [1], which is rock-solid and just plain amazing, and Scala Native [2].
[1] https://www.scala-js.org/
[2] https://scala-native.readthedocs.io/en/latest/