[Nursie]

Having used micronaut for a few years now, I hate it.

Maybe it's innate to trying to use a a fully fledged server-style framework in a serverless context, but I don't think it's suitable. In fact I think the whole idea ("Hey, let's bludgeon spring-like metaphors into an entirely new setting") was a poor one.

Java itself I've enjoyed more and more over time as the language has evolved into something much more expressive, and without all the enterprise crap. My hope is that one day frameworks like Micronaut will end up discarded too.

[never_inline]

It was a while back (when I was a worse programmer) I found both Micronaut and Quarkus dev experience more palatable than spring.

what did you dislike? Pervasive DI? Annotations? configuration mess?

[Nursie]

Never done much Spring, so I don't have a lot to compare to. But ...

I'm not a massive fan of using annotations in concept, because they obfuscate what's taking place. Unlike in (say) Python, where annotations are effectively functions wrapping the function they annotate, in java they're more akin to a customisable preprocessor. Obviously I do use them, liberally, because that's the way things are done, but I'm not a big fan. And using any modern framework relies on these a lot.

Micronaut gripes -

1. It works great until it doesn't, and you have a special case, and then you have to dig into source to figure out what on earth is going on.

2. Keeping up with latest isn't always easy, micronaut 3->4 was a huge effort.

3. For all it's called micronaut, the produced packages are pretty huge.

Serverless-specific gripes -

1. What I'm receiving isn't really an http message over a socket. It's an AWS gateway event with everything already read and packaged up. So there's no reason that (for instance) I shouldn't access the message body in a request filter, because I don't give a crap about the jetty server-loop being non-blocking.

2. Startup time is terrible. And when I managed to get a native compiled version to actually run, it got worse. A lot of this seems to be down to hibernate, but there's a big gap between startup and any logging from the framework at all. We've tried a bunch of stuff to remediate, so far with little success.

In general I think that serverless is such a different paradigm from a long-running server that approaching it from the point of view of "how can we make this the same so developers who've never thought outside of the spring-like box can still be productive?" was wrong from the outset.

[never_inline]

> Unlike in (say) Python, where annotations are effectively functions wrapping the function they annotate, in java they're more akin to a customisable preprocessor.

I find that Python decorators can do as much magic as an annotation processor - due to the dynamism of Python. Annotation processors, in most cases, produce a new class based on annotations on existing class / interface. The injection of that class is done by the DI container (unless it's a standalone annotation processor like mapstruct).

> And using any modern framework relies on these a lot.

To be fair to language designers, it's hard to avoid code generators. And they're a compelling thing compared to building proxy objects / DI / decorator / dataclass etc.. kind of functionality in language and getting it wrong.

> ... then you have to dig into source to figure out

Agree. It's not a "boring technology" yet.

> For all it's called micronaut, the produced packages are pretty huge.

How huge? And jlink or graal vm? Just curious.

> A lot of this seems to be down to hibernate,

With micronaut atleast, I remember using Micronaut Data JDBC. Anything is better than hibernate.

> In general I think that serverless is such a different paradigm from a long-running server.

Agreed.