While modding Minecraft 1.19.2 is pain, the pain mainly came from undocumented mojang's code, where you have to guess and validate your hypothesis before you write your code.
Modding Minecraft 1.8.9 is pain in the ass because of the barely working toolchains. Back then Minecraft's code is fairly easy to guess and work with. But the toolchain is unstable enough that literally several minutes ago it still launch Minecraft client properly. Then I close the game, made some change to the code, run the client again to test the change, and now it refuse to work. The runClient task finished successfully without launching the actual client and didn't give any error.
No matter how I cleared the cache, rebuild the project, it just refuses to work.
@skyblond Yeah, Minecraft can be slooooooooooooooooo(x infinity)oooow. ;)
I'm playing Vintage Story a bit lately, it loads super fast. Programmed in C# probably helped there. ;)
@trinsec I don't think so. The Gradle literally said the task is done and returned 0 while no errors are thrown and no client is running.
While java is generally slow, I do notice that 1.8.9 launches faster than 1.19.2, with the same JVM used.
@skyblond I only load Minecraft with huge modpacks.. so they'll all be slow to me either way. 😅
@trinsec I use fabric on 1.19.2 and use forge on 1.8.9.
The modern versions are fine (newer than 1.12).
But for older versions, a) fabric doesn't exist, b) forge dropped the support and leave with those super old out-of-date toolchains (from 5 years ago)
And... When I'm typing this reply, the Minecraft client just poped up. I have no idea with it suddenly working again.