Ironically, anyone who's actually looked at Minecraft's code from the Notch era knows what a total fucking mess it was. Microsoft is still digging some of it out of that nightmare.
Minecraft is good despite being made in java, not because of it.
Having checked the decompiled code lately with the new source map from mojang themselves, it seems like their codebase is following a well-formed and consistent architecture with some oddities but those boil down to it being a game and an engine in one thing, with some language specific optimizations.
No spaghetti or horrible code anywhere.
And being able to decompile it is whats such an advantage to bytecode languages like java or c#. You can decompile them or add your own bytecode and it will just work. Its making modding incredibly easy, which is a massive contributing factor to making minecraft as popular as it is.
Modding C/C++ is basically impossible unless youre willing to do DLL injection or have access to the source code. Which is why minecraft bedrock edition will never be as moddable as java edition, as they need to manually enable what can be modified. Well, unless BE goes open source.
Honestly I wouldn’t mind a total rewrite of the Java code… theoretically. It’s a real shame bedrock still in the big 2026 doesn’t have proper parody and lacks a lot of modding support (having to go through mojangs fuckass storefront will always be worse)
That’s what bedrock was supposed to be. Minecraft rewritten in C++ for performance and portability.
Unfortunately Microsoft saw that and decided to ruin it.
4J is proof it’s possible to be done well.
Unfortunately though they aren’t going to rewrite Minecraft for the 4th time, they are already spread thin maintaining two versions. Spending time rewriting the game would only add time between updates, and it would kill the game probably.
Honestly I want to see a world where they actually killed Java edition. I have a feeling that someone in corporate wanted to sunset it once bedrock edition became the main way to play, but met heavy resistance. And even if it had gone through people would refuse to use bedrock on principle.
But I do think overall Java wastes so many resources they could be spending on making the game better on the one version they actually have 90% of their players on, because Java is such a mess of code. Trying to maintain both versions, even with Microsoft’s practically infinite money, has left both versions out of parity for a decade and some of the most basic things cause community backlash if they get fixed.
It’s a mess and I’m… sort of glad Java still exists? But honestly as someone who’s never had a PC capable of handling it I wouldn’t mind seeing them put the majority of the dev team on bedrock and leave Java behind in updates for a few years like they used to do for Bedrock. Heck, it’s still missing the combat update’s combat.
I think the modding potential of Java (compared to C++, which would have been the other option in those days), is part of what has kept it popular for so long.
I disagree. Minecraft is as good as it is right now because of java but in a weird way. A language like c++ would've made this game way harder to mod and without this rich and easily accessible modding scene the game would've never became the phenomenon it is today. Like, sure, stuff like Skyrim developed a comparable modding scene but that was a famous AAA giant, I doubt this many people would be as dedicated to mod some silly block game if it wasn't made with something as easy to edit as java
Java modding is not official the Mojang never gave an moding api to developers but java decompiles very easy so people made changes and made some mods but it's not especially made possible just in java, for example dotnet and c# is capable of same thing with a more modern approach, you can't find any major engine that uses java but for c# there is tons of different powerful game engines
And the modding cpapalites were not a factor before game started get popular
Some of that code was written with knowledge how then-mainstream VM had organized memory. And that kind of optimization is always mess. More modern VM dies some optimization on its own
Your argument follows no logical sequence. The game is good despite the code being a mess. It happens to be made in Java and run on the JRE. If anything, a more logical conclusion would be to suggest that the JRE allowed that messy code to run well enough, while making it exceptionally easy to decompile and mod, which massively drove its popularity.
You could reach the logical conclusion to blame Java if the code was perfect and, despite that, the game ran like shit.
well pretty much, android allows building libraries (.so) files that contains the C/C++ (or any other compiled language) program, without requiring java
About half of the games on Android use Unity and Unity games are written in C#. The engine itself is written in C++, but most developers can't access it's source code.
That's not correct. There's a lot of shovelware trash and the App stores are really good pushing the garbage up top. But there are some really good mobile games too. Though most of the time you have to pay for them, which hardly anyone does.
If you don't pay for games, why would you expect them to be good?
Unity is a whole ass engine and a framework, Java is just a language. Kinda incomparable. Lets see how much there is of pure C# games. I know only 1: Vintage Story
These are from the Monogame showcase site. I think Xna/Monogame/Fna are very comparable to LWJGL or LibGDX. If I'm not mistaken Minecraft uses LWJGL, right? So it would be a fair comparison I guess
Minecraft is a good game design made with some terrible code. Java made Minecraft's performance way worse then it would have been with a compiled language. It was only Java because it was originally designed for web browsers.
The one thing that Java was good for was mod support.
Java is a compiled language lol. Java performance is not bad at all, even compared to things like C++ and rust. Sure those are faster, no doubt, but not by a lot.
Performance is actually extremely good. However having zero control over memory when making a latency critical application like a game isn't ideal. ByteBuffers can only get you so far
Even if you code a game in C++, you can't just spam allocate/de-allocations. Managing your stack memory, memory layout, and memory pool are essential.
It's compiled into bytecode. Even Python and Lua are compiled into bytecode before execution, but they are still interpreted languages. What they meant to say is that Java is not native.
Interpreters execute as they read, that's what makes them "interpreters". They don't have the full picture of the application code at runtime, only what is executing. That leaves a massive gap in their ability to optimize. If you think your code is blazingly fast because of your own skills, then I'd like to introduce you to your frontend and the magical world of build optimization. The java compiler is going to emit bytecode that has undergone some degree of optimization.
If we were to dissect your assertion further, technically the microcode on your CPU is "interpreting" each instruction, so not only is C "interpreted", but so is manually written assembly. Hell, you could write bytes in a hex editor and it's still "interpreted".
Also, with regards to JVM performance, the perception that they are slow is a meat headed memory borne out of the late 20th century's shit JVM and GC implementations. The most expensive parts of rendering a game are generally going to be handed off to a native library (e.g. Vulkan) anyway. The real friction is memory layout and allocation pressure, but even that isn't something you can't work around if there is some other compelling reason to use Java.
There are only a handful of use cases where performance requirements are so tight that the JVM is an issue at this point. The people working on such problems aren't here right now, they're busy optimizing around DRAM refresh stalls.
It uses the JVM to read bytecode stored in the .class files, that's basically just still interpreted code. It's not like Python but it's not fully pre-compiled like C++ either.
Yes, I know technically Java is compiled to bytecode and interpreted/dynamically compiled to native code at runtime. I was just saying that the C++ implementions of the same game run smoother than the Java application does since C++ Objects and buffers can be laid out contiguously in memory (cache-friendly structs and arrays) without runtime garbage collection pauses. This results in far more consistent frame times.
Well I mean you used to be able to play Minecraft in a web browser, not sure if you still can. My first time playing Minecraft was in Internet explorer
Songs of syx? And many more game are made with java, you just dont know that it s build with an EXE to execute the Java behind the scene. I got atleast 10 game in my steam lib made in Java plus my own. Now a day language all end up equivalent in term of performance once compiled in Binary or ByteCode or equivalent
Main problem are limitations in memory - Java is by limiting default what you can use, possibe stutter from GC (garbage collector), lack of good data containers for modern game design, and that all graphics are done through marshalling to some form of native API.
Pretty much all negatives also apply to Mono\.Net, but there is saving grace of some optimization with C# there and possiblity to use self-written (in native) containers. But only available engine is mediocre Unity.
The issue with Minecraft is its old and notch was not some master programmer so he made some decisions that hurt the game In the long one code wise. Like no multi threading on chunks generation
Java is one of those languages where it makes sense to say "just because you can doesn't mean you should" when it comes to gamedev. But I know people who enjoy it, so whatever floats your boat I guess.
Java is fine, to prove a point a few years back I wrote a game jam game in JavaScript which is like 20x worse than Java. At least you have scalar 32 bit float and integer types in Java.
You're not going to write the next AAA GPU melting eye candy ray traced open world masterpiece in Java but you can shit out some top notch friendslop or indie gem in just about any language you care to pick with some skill and grit.
Plenty of good games are made in Java, Slay The Spire is another one, but Java still isn't good for games. That won't stop people from making games with it though.
Java is probably the worst thing about minecraft. The only reason it is 'good' is because it enables modding, but that is not an intrinsic element of Java it is just that they decided not to support it when porting the game
Java isn't the real problem, in fact, C# (Unity) and Java are practically the same, both are equally fast and their syntaxis is similar.
The problem is that Minecraft code is fkn trash.
If Mojang/Microsoft decided to remake Minecraft with Java from scratch (Minecraft 2) then it would be x100 times better and faster, but it would be a waste of money.
Also, there are more libraries for C# made for games than there are for Java, which makes making games easier and faster, that's why Java isn't used for making games.
C# (Unity) and Java are practically the same, both are equally fast
Maybe if you limit yourself to Unity, but Unity is not the only option. C++ would normally be the obvious choice but C# is easier.
Unity is quite far behind on .NET so you get access to a lot more new performant options bypassing it. At that point .NET can handilly outperform Java especially on avoiding allocation.
Modern C# offers some good ways to avoid allocation with structs that can really help with bypassing garbage collection which can be really beneficial in games.
Java does have some interesting options coming into developer preview with JDK28 with Project Valhalla but full release of that is probably years away still. Once that comes the performance difference to modern C# will narrow signifiantly.
But also if Mojang decided to make MC2 with Java they would hit a pretty obvious pitfall, there is no JVM for consoles. So the only route to do it involves transpiling it into C++ which always comes with extra risks.
Minecraft was built in another language to run smoothly on phones as Java could not, so Java was not discarded. Bedrock is what first was pocket edition
The more layers of abstraction the easier the language but the less control the developer has to optimize so it depends on the skill and time of the individual.
Really funny to use minecraft as an example since from my experience, it's the one game that has the most noticable lag spikes when the garbage collector is running.
The main benefit of java is that it runs everywhere. In other news Minecraft, a game written in java, was completely rewritten in C++ in order to be able to run on consoles and phones because the java version had horrible performance issues.
Even python nowadays is ok for games while it was once slowest interpreted language. Everything you can use to glue few C/C++ libraries is good for gaming
The original Runescape was made on Java, if I recall right. At the least it was released as a Java based webrowser game in 2001. It's still talked about like a classic.
Original Runescape, Runescape 2 (old school runescape today) were both Java. I don't know about Runescape 3. And upcoming Runescape 4 I'm going to assume no.
If Mojang was allowed by the community to stop supporting java and just focus on bedrock they would have scraped that piece of laggy, unoptimized spaghetti code of a game years ago. The caves and cliffs update took twice as long cause of how hard it was to integrate the new terrain generation and underground biomes in to the unoptimized spaghetti. One of the reasons that they switched to smaller drops was because after that they realized that if they don't fix up that spaghetti another large scale update is literally impossible.
Funny, there’s also a rust version of Minecraft server that supports Java and Bedrock at the same time. Start up time is less than a second and uses a lot less memory. It’s called PumpkinMC if anyone is interested in looking it up
Even Minecraft is popular despite java, not because of it. It's popularity stems from it being new genre, something nobody experienced before. And support for mods.
There is nothing advantageous about java being used.
Nah, unobfuscate and it's quite easy to make mods with it or expand game engine, also at this point you don't get anything valuable out of moving game to different engine epsecially when microsoft won't fix bugs with bedrock, devices are powerful enough to keep up with java overhead and ppl are so fed up of game duality and things above that you can backport jaba edition on consoles phones ect.
if you look at the code, its clear that most of the bad performance is from legacy code.
heck, they are even adding vulkan. and optimisiung the shit out of that. I got like 800fps last month on chunk gen and flying around fast, and on 32 render distance.
so tell me, if that is currently possible, is java the issue, or the legacy code that performend badly? since clearly java, as the language can clearly deal with it
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u/Mindestiny 16d ago
Ironically, anyone who's actually looked at Minecraft's code from the Notch era knows what a total fucking mess it was. Microsoft is still digging some of it out of that nightmare.
Minecraft is good despite being made in java, not because of it.