Java is cool, no need for crutches like Lombok.
True, but Groovy is even cooler!
Only for small stuff, if you have a 100k lines project you are absolutely unable to maintain it while staying sane.
Lombok makes Java cool again
201–210 of 239 posts
Re: Lombok makes Java cool again
#202I'm interested in the downsides of using Lombok, since the article seems to only focus on its positives and makes it seem like I should download it and start using it right now. Is there anyone here with Lombok experience that wants to share any issues they've run into while using it? All I can think of right now is the fact that the source code isn't compatible with Java.
Yeah, I use it at a financial services client. A previous architect chose it because it was a pet project of his (he contributed to Delombok). The premise is fine...I have no problem with it. But the default generation of @EqualsAndHashcode literally pulls in the WORLD to generate the output. The real world scenario we had was this. Lots of POJOs were created, many were simply but a non-trivial number were NOT. Those…
I have a /really/ hard time believing you wouldn't factor out a couple of POJO's from those properties that belong together and include them to compose your classes. Sounds more like sloppy data modeling.
Re: Lombok makes Java cool again
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd argue that GC still isn't taken seriously as an option for high performance code by people who actually write high performance code and Java is not the language of choice when performance is a primary goal. The lack of value types hurts it there even compared to other similar GC languages like C#.
Tell that to the high-frequency-trader crowd, they almost use java exclusivly, because even 1ms equals a few thousands to them, correctness is apparently worth it for them.
My understanding is that C++ is commonly used in that domain due to the performance requirements, though I don't know how common Java is relatively. C++ is used enough that there is a performance focused Study Group SG14 on the standards committee that explicitly includes trading as a use case: https://groups.google.com/a/isocpp.org/forum/m/#!forum/sg14
I'm from the games programming world where C++ still dominates for performance reasons. Where GC is widely used with C# in Unity, Unity are building their own C# compiler without GC for performance critical code (the Burst compiler) and GC is a major cause of performance issues in existing Unity games.
C++ and another non GC language (Fortran) are also the most used languages for HPC ( High Performance Computing) in scientific computing.
C and C++ also dominate in performance sensitive and resource constrained embedded programming.
Re: Lombok makes Java cool again
#204I think java made some wrong decision, with bigggest one being very pragmatics generics-addition, resulting in trouble down the road like List not being possible. But I don't think checked exceptions are one of them ;) I don't like too much flexibility in a language that has strong types. If you undermine the type-system, why not code in python? But some additions of Lombok seem worthwile.
> I don't think checked exceptions are one of them While they may not have been the wrong decision, empirical evidence continually shows they add a syntactical burden many devs just work around (e.g. just wrap in a RuntimeException anyways). It's understandable why most modern languages don't consider predictable exceptions as part of the function signatures (though many discourage exceptions altogether in all but th…
And while we are at it, @SneakyThrows by Lombok.
Re: Lombok makes Java cool again
#205I helped in the development of a microservice as a third party developer for a big lodgings reservation company.
The infrastructure team of the main company forced us to include Lombok and use it and the code was a mess. Too much automagically generated code that was hard to debug.
My company managed to deliver the microservice with enough quality, but I really hated the experience with Lombok, vanilla Java with the libraries needed for the task is more than enough (more control over your code).
Re: Lombok makes Java cool again
#206Lombok is a useful crutch if you're writing lots of Java code on a day to day basis. However, given how easy it is to use Kotlin alongside Java I would question whether Lombok is the right solution to the problem. Kotlin has data classes which auto generate sensible 'toString' and 'hashCode' methods which is a massive time saver. Really, if you are considering introducing Kotlin to a Java project I'd recommend you ju…
Kotlin is great. But go and try to persuade your company to bless another language for production.
It may be easy when your engineering org is 5 persons. It's much harder, genuinely harder, when it's 250 engineers, and an hour of downtime costs hundreds of thousands. Adoption of another language, even clearly superior and interoperable, becomes a large and costly undertaking.
So "just use Kotlin" is not always possible, and I'm thankful to Lombok's authors for their work.
Re: Lombok makes Java cool again
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
The same can be said about Scala and Groovy. (Groovy brings in those generators via an annotation)
Of those three (Kotlin, Scala, Groovy), Kotlin is by far the most pragmatic. Scala is nice, more powerful, but has a high cost when it comes to learning curve, complexity, and the library ecosystem. I'm not sure of the state of Groovy at this point after it got transferred to the apache foundation. Kotlin on the other hand strikes a nice balance in many areas.
How do you define pragmatic? Apache Groovy is still under active development. We've actually started using it more for green-field development where I work.
Re: Lombok makes Java cool again
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tell that to the high-frequency-trader crowd, they almost use java exclusivly, because even 1ms equals a few thousands to them, correctness is apparently worth it for them.
My understanding is that C++ is commonly used in that domain due to the performance requirements, though I don't know how common Java is relatively. C++ is used enough that there is a performance focused Study Group SG14 on the standards committee that explicitly includes trading as a use case: https://groups.google.com/a/isocpp.org/forum/m/#!forum/sg14 I'm from the games programming world where C++ still dominates f…
It's amusing to see someone defend absence of GC by talking about how niche that's become ;)
Re: Lombok makes Java cool again
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
My understanding is that C++ is commonly used in that domain due to the performance requirements, though I don't know how common Java is relatively. C++ is used enough that there is a performance focused Study Group SG14 on the standards committee that explicitly includes trading as a use case: https://groups.google.com/a/isocpp.org/forum/m/#!forum/sg14 I'm from the games programming world where C++ still dominates f…
It's amusing to see someone defend absence of GC by talking about how niche that's become ;)
I don't really know what you mean. I took issue with the claim that Java demonstrated that GC was suitable for high performance code and pointed out that even though GC is more common today than it was when Java came out that it is still avoided in applications that prioritize performance. Maybe those are 'niche' but some of them are rather large niches and there are several of them.
I personally don't find GC very useful nor do I think it's a particularly good idea and it's great to see new languages like Rust taking new approaches to memory management but I recognize that it's now the default in the majority of applications that don't prioritize performance or deal with severe resource constraints and that many programmers find it valuable. There are actually several languages I like that rely on a GC, Java is just not one of them.
Re: Lombok makes Java cool again
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you feel about Spring? I'm a fan of Java itself as well, but find myself conflicted whenever I use Spring/Boot. It's very nice when it works. But when the magic formula isn't recited correctly....you get frustrated and wind up visiting HN to forget about how unpleasant it is. ahem
I think that it brought a good competition against JEE (back when it was still J2EE), however I would still just use JEE for Java Web projects.
Just curious -- why?