It takes way more time to master and be very comfortable with a language due to its ecosystem, though. Some languages are more likely to click with a person, yet underneath they are all the same (minus the functional languages that form their own group), e.g. some performance issues may require looking at the generate assembly code.

The same applies to having a method "void x(String s)", it cannot be changed to "void x(Object s)" (even though all the code would compile with auto downcast) but both methods have to co-exist being overloaded. There is more to the binary compatibility but I'd leave it here.

The way to do it is keeping the existing public (and protected) methods (&fields), possibly deprecating them, along with introducing new ones. Effectively any removal of anything that has been made accessible, public mostly, is forbidden.

Personally, whenever I had to maintain library code I stuck to the same principle, so folks could grab a new version w/o worrying or doing any changes on their own.

java never had that phase. If anything it had a full binary class (not even source, e.g. long and int are not compatible on binary level) compatibility. Generally you can take an application from '98 and run it nowadays.

It's only recent changes (jigsaw in java9 mostly) that were made them to drop some of that part.

If I am to record something like queue times (as in latency), I'd have multiple samplings of both time enqueued and entries (or approx entries size), provided the queues have a reasonable size() method (e.g. not O(n) and not blocking). Even having max entries increased with lower overall latency, it'd speak of bursty behaviour.

In that regard - Recording percentiles en masse (production) is rather expensive when there are thousands of metrics. The avg/mean + max require few bytes (sub cacheline) and it can be implemented lock-free.

It was already introduced in the local women league...

besides a significantly more common 4-3-3, I can't think of anything I particularly found entertaining - the waterworks, the extra VARs, the super special offside line. That's no feast. (and I can continue)

>FIFA currently makes 40% of what the NHL makes,

That's entirely irrelevant, if FIFA even makes zero - most of the money is in the local leagues. FIFA is just there for the world cup

not a german brand

likely it'd a be perf. hit in most cases. They'd have to copy to the tail end (likely) of the allocated area. Or the start and offset the pointer, they'd need to know the size of the metadata and account for that, including aligning it.Hence, the tail feels 'nicer'

It's possible to manually use mmap and forgo malloc entirely, rolling your own arena manager.