[hintymad]

> I never would've guessed that in 2022, Java would start looking more and more appealing in new ways.

I don't quite understand the hatred (to the point of shouting "using Java? Over my dead body), especially in startups, towards Java. I mean, it's a language, big deal. Java's ecosystem more than enough offsets whatever inefficiencies in the language itself, at least for building many of the internal CRUD services. Besides, people like Martin Thompson shows us how to build low-latency applications with ease too. Libraries like JCTools beat the shit out of many new languages when it comes to concurrency for productivity, performance, and reliability. How many engineers in startups claim that they hate Elasticsearch because "Java sucks"? Yet how many can really build a platform as versatile as ES or a Lucene replacement with economical advantages? How many people in startups openly despise Spark or Flink and set out to build a replace because "Java is slow and ugly". Yeah, I've seen a few. And a payment company insists that Rust is the best language because "GC is inefficient and ugly", even though they are still in the phase of product iteration and all their services simply wrap around payment gateways? What's the point?

Disclaimer: I use Go in work. It's not like I have skin in the game for speaking about Java.

[jasonhansel]

I actually think the Java ecosystem is part of why people dislike it. Java seems to attract a lot of extremely heavyweight frameworks (like Spring) that are too complex to fully understand and too heavyweight to make sense for most projects.

[vips7L]

So use helidon, micronaut, javalin, or spark if you want something small, but I suspect in any real application you’ll just end up recreating half of spring. That’s what my company did and it’s not near the quality of anything in Spring.

[pkolaczk]

> how to build low-latency applications with ease too

That's a bit of a stretch. Surely, you can build low-latency apps, but I'd be very careful with the "with ease" bit. Low-latency Java often means zero heap allocations, aggressive object avoidance / reuse, heavy use of primitive types everywhere, so it is very much low-level like C, only with no tools that even plain old C offers, e.g. no true stack-allocated structs and no pointers. And forget about all the high-level zero-cost abstractions that C++ and Rust offer.

[hintymad]

Fair point. The "with ease" part has also to do with Java's ecosystem. For instance, Martin Thompson used to teach people how to write a single-producer-multi-consumer queue. In a matter of hours, people can achieve 100M+ reads and writes on a 2014 MacBook Pro (I understand that throughput is different from latency, but given the fixed number of CPUs in this case, the latency of such implementation is also phenomenal). Better yet, Java folks have libraries like JCTools, so they don't event have to spend that few hours to get even higher performance.

My litmus test is how fast one can implement functionalities of the data structures/algorithms in the book The Art of Multiprocessor Programming in production quality. It looks chic languages like Rust are not there yet.

[pkolaczk]

Don't forget "chic" languages like Rust have the whole C ecosystem at their disposal.

Having done Java for many years and recently also done Rust, I'm not very convinced one ecosystem is richer than the other, when we talk about high performance computing. I've already hit a few things that are present in Rust I wished to have in Java. Generally I find the multithreading/concurrency libraries available in Rust very good.

[hintymad]

Definitely not everything or HPC. I was talking about building services that don’t need granular management of memory.

[christophilus]

For me, Java and MySQL kind of died* when they became an Oracle thing. I just don’t want to go near anything that Oracle touches.

The other thing is that I tend to write little programs where simple deployment on a low-resource machine is desirable.

Go can handle that. Java kind of does the job with Graal now.

The JVM is incredible, though, and I love Clojure. I’m hoping that Loom + Graal helps to kickstart more competition in the “concurrent, parallel, simple to deploy” space.

* Died to me; obviously they’re both alive and well in the broad world.

[kaba0]

> For me, Java and MySQL kind of died* when they became an Oracle thing. I just don’t want to go near anything that Oracle touches.

Come on, that’s a cheap reason (for Java, for open source db I would also go with postgre but for different reasons). Java is one of the very few languages with a full specification (not “whatever our compiler does, that’s the spec”), it has plenty of fully independent full implementations that even pass one of the most detailed test suites for complete spec-compliance, and the platform is so so much ingrained in the biggest corporations that any one of the following companies could easily, single-handedly finance the future of Java if anything were to happen: Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Alibaba.

And for all the bad things one can without doubt throw at Oracle, they are surprisingly good at shepherding the language and platform. It has been growing in a very good direction with fast update cycle, it has state-of-the art research and development going on, and with Loom on the near horizon and Valhalla on the slightly further horizon I would say Java has one of the brightest futures ahead. Like, Valhalla would bring automagically a huge performance improvement for free, and Java is very competitive in performance as is.

[sudarshnachakra]

Agree that Java is pretty good with records / sealed types / loom, but one nice thing about the Oracle Java team is they do not add half baked features (primarily since they have the last mover advantage) - for (e.g.) Valhalla will have value types, but they'll be immutable so they can be freely copied and used. Loom will have structured concurrency on debut, which IMHO makes vthreads manageable.

But I've my own apprehensions about loom which actually breaks synchronized blocks (by pinning the carrier thread), and are used extensively in legacy libraries and even in the more recent ones (like opentelemetry java sdk).

[vips7L]

Oracle has done great things for Java. The renewed investment over the past few years are bringing amazing things.

[tomcam]

I like how this was downvoted with no comments. Stay classy, HN

[voidfunc]

Written a lot of Java, Python, and Go in my career... every single time I see someone take a hardline stance against Java it's always because they had one particular bad experience with it 15-20 years ago and couldn't bend it to their will like Python or Lisp. Or they fought Maven, or some other ancillary tool. Or they rail on the generics and yet the use-cases they come up with for true reified generics are generally niche.

Java's got problems. The biggest one is the framework laden ecosystem and that some of the frameworks are all or nothing. But the language and runtime are rock solid. I don't get the hate.

[icedchai]

Mostly Java, Python, and a bit of Go here, also. If you're not sure what language to develop a back end service in, you'll rarely go wrong by picking Java. The JVM absolutely is rock solid. The number of libraries and frameworks available is amazing. If you stay way from heavy weight frameworks and use something leaner like Spring Boot or Dropwizard, you'll be fine.