11–20 of 21 posts
JVM is a heavy old begemoth. That is the core reason behind it not being popular among startups. This doesn't mean it's bad (sometimes you need big gun, something mature and advanced), just out of many startups' immediate scope.
JVM is a heavy old begemoth. That is the core reason behind it not being popular among startups. This doesn't mean it's bad (sometimes you need big gun, something mature and advanced), just out of many startups' immediate scope.
Java is not heavy. You can use GraalVM native compilation, and it will be as light as Golang. Modern frameworks like Quarkus or Helidon are lightweight. Sure, if you are working for an old style Java shop stuck with Java 8 and JavaEE. That's another story...
Having few examples that jumps out of the tradition doesn't make something as a whole suddenly different.
On the other hand, Go is a breath of fresh air; the tooling is simple and one can actually learn them in no time. There's less magic, and so a bit more of repetition, but I can live with that.
I don't see the advantage of having the JVM to be honest. I just don't see why it would be needed in 2025 (the "Write once, run anywhere" is not relevant anymore).
Running a new startup now and choose modern Java (JDK 21+) with Spring Boot and it's been fantastic. Have previously built startups using both Haskell and Python/Django in the past. Ignore the folks talking about it not being cool, heavy, boring or whatever - modern Java is just super nice and quick to work with.
Some positives we noted,
- "good-enough" integrated type system & language features, e.g. immutable records, type inference, generics, sum and product types with exhaustive pattern matching, lambdas, streams (along with the new stream-gatherers). We feel the gain isn't enough to switch to Kotlin anymore.
- Fantastic tooling, from IDEs, build systems, cloud integrations, remote debugging, settings configuration etc.
- Massive ecosystem - there are libraries for everything, and all major vendors, including cloud providers and most startups, have a Java SDK
- Spring Boot is a great framework, especially for API backends coming from Django - setting up things likes OAuth and OIDC was super easy. Spring AI is developing rapidly, for instance it got MCP support within a week or two of it being released
- Verbosity can be tamed with annotations processors, and Lombok if you desire (we do but understand some don't like it). JSpecify helps with null-checking.
- Performance is great, you just don't have to think about it at a startup scale, and Loom / Virtual Threads makes it even easier to build performant web services without the mental overhead of building `async` systems
I could go on, and like all things there are of course negatives, but we took the plunge and have been really happy with it.
I worked for a startup that used Kotlin. The language itself is not that bad (if you ignore the engineers that want to use every single time all the features the language has to offer), but the ecosystem was awful. We were using Gradle, and Spring Boot: just too much magic for my taste. Gradle itself is a beast I never fully understood, and I don't comfortable working with such tools (the Gradle userguide has over 10…
Love Java because of how robust the JDK is with respect to Collections, Concurrency, IO and Cryptography. At the same time you can pick and choose exactly what modules you need to keep your application light weight. Also, I find Java has become more of a joy to write in recently as project Amber continues to release features every 6 months. (https://openjdk.org/projects/amber/)
Outside of the base and java.net.http JDK modules, the only external library I rely on is Bouncy Castle for the ed25519 utilities it provides. Considering some of the services sign financial transactions, it is nice to be able to minimize the risk of a malicious take over of a 3rd party library.
Only using AI for generating some of the more manual labor code.
If you are interested in building on Solana in Java check out https://github.com/sava-software/sava and https://docs.glam.systems
Yes - best decision we made. Running a new startup now and choose modern Java (JDK 21+) with Spring Boot and it's been fantastic. Have previously built startups using both Haskell and Python/Django in the past. Ignore the folks talking about it not being cool, heavy, boring or whatever - modern Java is just super nice and quick to work with. Some positives we noted, - "good-enough" integrated type system & language f…
I am using Kotlin with Quarkus for my healthtech startup (founded last year), mainly because it just works. JVM is a very optimised piece of software, and it can handle almost anything you throw at it. And I like writing Kotlin, which I think is more expressive compared to something like Go, while being less verbose than Java. Contrary to popular opinion of not touching ORMs, I use Hibernate, and it might be the best…