[maxpert]

So I've my self used Lombok but I've been using Kotlin lately. IMHO Kotlin if far far superior in terms of how it provides appropriate constructs that are patches to a stale language (hopefully new release cycle fixes it).

So far I've observed with libraries like Lombok there is a smaller community (compared to language community) that vets the idea; and the features are opinionated to that particular community. Which results into fragmentation; just as example https://immutables.github.io/ and https://github.com/google/auto are two libraries providing features like factories and immutable value classes. Then you get articles like https://codeburst.io/lombok-autovalue-and-immutables-or-how-... for improving your code.

This in my opinion doesn't hurt as long as you are a small company. But when your code is going to be used across teams with different opinions, and language doesn't enforce a single way to define construct these kind of byte-code mangling ideas fall apart. I've personally people complain about Lombok and they hate it every bit. Doing these constructs at language level removes debate, and unifies how people in larger community. I hope newer versions of Java move fast enough to make something simple like `@Cleanup` a thing of past. I will highly encourage everyone to try Kotlin too; it's almost transparent drop-in with better syntax.