A few countries, including Switzerland and Spain, have wealth taxes on a small scale. Several, most recently France, have abandoned them as unworkable.
There exists a simple self-correcting protocol for establishing the value of property: the owner declares the value, and the state reserves the right to buy at that price. Or auction it off. If the owner declines to sell that auction price becomes the new value for computing the wealth tax.
The reason they say "it's unworkable" is because the rich don't want to pay taxes.
That works for real estate, and indeed property taxes are a long running staple of government taxes precisely because land is fixed. Economically, land value taxes are considered the most efficient form of taxation as they have no dead-weight losses, and were championed by Ricardo. But if I have a contract that assigns 10% of the earnings of some mutual fund to a holding company in the Bahamas, then it is not so easy to convince the government of the Bahamas to join you in seizing the asset. The money is overseas, and the wealthy only need to transfer to your jurisdiction whatever they need to spend, which is generally much, much less than what they earn in a given year.
So what happens when you try to tax unrealized capital instead of land is that the former is highly mobile and can arrange to be not subject to your jurisdiction if the rate of taxation is higher than whatever inconvenience is obtained by moving the claims around, so the net result is a loss of overall tax revenue. This is why France abandoned the ISF and replaced it with a tax on land, which is not mobile, and why most jurisdictions have low taxes on capital compared to less mobile things. It's not because it is "fair", but because there are limits to what you can collect that don't apply to things like land or labor.
I don't want to play anything from Proton Drive, I don't want it to do anything beyond storing files. I want any kind of active content disabled or blocked, because making these things possible leads to vulnerabilities.
This article indicates the company is not looking at safeguarding customers' data but wasting their efforts on idiotic marketing. What are they doing? Why?
GCJ was great - I wrote a handset UI entirely in java for a startup in the early 2000's, basically android before android existed, using GCJ. I remember their native interface was somewhat more convenient to use than JNI.
I wish we had GCJ resurrected, now that the java libraries are GPL'd.
That would place significant limitations on the applications that can be compiled. As the JEP explains: “Features such as dynamic class loading, dynamic linkage, dynamic dispatch, and dynamic reflection bring vast expressive power, and have been fundamental to the platform's success. HotSpot handles these features naturally, while static compilers struggle with them. Even heroic amounts of static analysis cannot make up for the fact that these features require many decisions to be made at run time. Implementors of static compilers for Java code have therefore resorted to incompatible constraints, such as closed-world assumptions, and to putting significant burdens on developers, such as having to identify in advance the classes eligible for reflection.”
Therefore I don’t see AOT-only becoming an integral part of standard Java in the foreseeable future.
It works pretty well for greenfield projects on .NET, so long as you can live without third-party libraries that don't support AOT.
Existing code bases can be a pain, though, especially applications that heavily rely on things like C++/CLI and COM Interop that basically need to be rewritten from scratch.
Which is not to say that it's intended to replace the traditional JIT runtime in applications where it isn't troublesome, because it's not.
EF Core and F# still don't fully work, neither do the GUI frameworks, with exception of the buggy WinUI, mostly because it is all COM/WinRT underneath.
EF Core heavily relies on reflection so that's not really a surprise. F# not working surprised me but apparently the main thing is its `printf` depends on reflection.
By "the GUI frameworks" I assume you mean Microsoft's GUI frameworks. They're all basically abandoned or just bad. Use Avalonia! It's better, cross-platform, and supports AOT!
Well, they had enough time to refactor EF Core to use code generators.
F# is improving on .NET 11, but still not fully there, as contrary to the rest of .NET, it is mostly community driven.
Most Microsoft shops only consider Microsoft GUI frameworks, regardless of the great work done by Avalonia, and Uno as well.
As for being bad, they surely are much better than most competitors from other ecosystems, unless we're adding Delphi, C++ Builder, Qt into the picture.
I had projects with Java on the server and Microsoft GUIs on the desktop, for example. Swing and JavaFX are also quite good, however require additional programming for what Forms and WPF do out of the box, unless one is willing to pay for something like JGoodies.
we are not talking about fully supporting dynamic loading, because it's not needed in all the cases, and in some cases, the list of allowed classes in the application can (or must) be limited.
i guess what i am saying is that AOT-only case is not "standard java", but something that will make a (more) useful replacement for things like c/c++.
> i guess what i am saying is that AOT-only case is not "standard java", but something that will make a (more) useful replacement for things like c/c++.
What is the objective here? Startup latency or throughput? Both will be vastly improved by JEP 544.
If you haven't checked it out yet, GraalVM's Native Image [1] already let's do AOT compilation suitable for distribution. You have to do some configuration to deal with reflection and dynamic class loading since there's no JVM in the produced build, but it comes with tooling to simplify that. And that restriction is being addressed by Project Crema [2].
The slight drawback is that AOT compiled Java code's performance isn't as good as the JIT compiled form running on the JVM.
There's a reason why folks keep coming back to JIT compilation. It's hard to beat the value that can be gained from actually gathering data on how the code is actually used, which leads to a whole set of potential optimisations (which is the problem Profile Guided Optimisation attempts to solve for AOT compiled code.) The JVM is arguably one of the most advanced and capable JITing runtimes.
As with anything it's a trade off. Fast start times, pretty fast running (I think maybe less memory usage?); vs the full JIT speed you can get on the JVM at the cost of start-up speed and memory consumption. All depends on what you want to use the application for.
If you're talking something like a serverless function, go native. If you're talking production server where you're measuring runtime in more than dozens of minutes, probably better to stick to the JVM & JIT.
Full agreement with everything you said. Just one detail to add on serverless (and potentially in a scheduled environment like k8s), startup time can be an order of magnitude or more faster in a native build. For instance, I have some quarkus applications that can take 10 seconds to ready running via the jre that take 10ms or less to start as a graalvm built binary.
Java has many dynamic features where runtime optimization is required to remove the overhead. Virtual method calls are opt-out instead of opt-in, and there is an open world assumption. The possibility of doing stack allocation of objects depends on the call hierarchy (in the future it will get a bit easier with value objects). Also, C/C++ are not managed languages, therefore the effects of bad optimization don't hurt as much.
That won't be necessary when 544 lands. The only thing you'd gain is not having to ship the JIT compilers in a jlink build. Also, I'm fairly certain that the JIT compilers can be turned off with some combination of runtime flags to ensure only the AOT generated code is executed.
I wasn't surveyed but I would be part of that group. I believe the government has been corrupt for as long as I've been alive, if not longer. I also believe that it is not actually worse now than in the past. And contrary to what many uncharitable people in this thread claim, I am equally unhappy no matter which party backs the crooks in power. I just want a government that serves me, and I haven't had that in my 41 years on this earth.
The reason they say "it's unworkable" is because the rich don't want to pay taxes.
reply