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Java 27

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Re: Java 27

#171

Post by dcminter »

moomin wrote: post #5

C# dev here: it’s amazing how different this is from a Microsoft release. First off, Oracle are doing versions at approximately twice the cadence. But also, and I’m guessing this is a function of the much larger Java audience: things rarely get two preview versions in a proper release. Updates in beta versions, yes, all the time. It also feels like Microsoft are bundling a lot more into the platform and leaving less…

Java releases used to be glacial multi-year affairs. Lots of discussion of features that then missed the release train and you knew they'd not be with you for another multi-year period.

They made a conscious decision to switch to a regular six-month cadence and it's been all the better for it. The preview-mechanism has been terrific there too, allowing half-baked features to be aired without absolutely committing to something that turns out to be flawed.

Edit: Ninja-ed by Romario77's sibling comment :)

Re: Java 27

#172

Post by rohan_ »

pron wrote: post #94
Horffupolde wrote: post #15

Serious question: when should one use Java for greenfield projects in 2026?

These days, Java is mostly used in greenfield software that has to be very reliable, very performant, and last for many years. So it's often the first choice for banking, telecom, finance, government, defence, manufacturing control, logistics and shipping, media streaming, retail, hospitality, healthcare etc.. It's usually not a first pick for more exciting software, such as Python type checkers, JS bundlers, or TUI…

This is quite the take - i doubt most startups building in these spaces are using Java.

Re: Java 27

#173

Post by davidee »

ndriscoll wrote: post #30
kfir wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't you go with golang in that case?

Golang gives you none of nice features of a modern language while being about the same performance tier as Scala or Java, so there's basically no reason not to use Scala.

This made me chuckle.

Aside: Scala dev here - but I only talk about how wonderful it is with people I trust (mostly Go and Rust developers I used to work with).

Also, Scala Native means I don’t always have to worry about the JVM depending on the use case.

ScalaJS is fun too.

Re: Java 27

#174

Post by dcminter »

Romario77 wrote: post #170
moomin wrote: post #5

C# dev here: it’s amazing how different this is from a Microsoft release. First off, Oracle are doing versions at approximately twice the cadence. But also, and I’m guessing this is a function of the much larger Java audience: things rarely get two preview versions in a proper release. Updates in beta versions, yes, all the time. It also feels like Microsoft are bundling a lot more into the platform and leaving less…

the release cycle time was a deliberate choice. Java tried to do fairly large updates and sometimes the release cycle would be very unpredictable as things would slip and take much longer than anticipated. So to make it more predictable and to keep updates coming they switched to 6 months cadence with long term support (LTS) every two years. This I think is a pretty good way of doing things, makes people who plan thi…

I remember Dolphin being a particularly painful one, and as I recall it ended up with some weird compromises (wasn't erasure supposed to avoid needing to update the bytecode format, but then annotations required it anyway? Something along those lines)

Re: Java 27

#175

Post by [deleted] »

brabel wrote: post #132
pron wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They lack in performance, stability (compatibility), observability (telemetry), productivity, or some combination thereof. They are chosen, of course (especially C#; Go and Rust are far behind), but not as much as Java.

I think you have a biased view. The number of stuff written in Rust in the last couple of years has absolutely exploded. For example, I see a lot of projects now that provide SDKs in Rust but don’t bother with Java. And I say this as someone who still writes most of my code ( or tell my LLM to write) in Java.

[deleted]

Re: Java 27

#176

Post by retrodaredevil »

arein3 wrote: post #10

Project Valhalla will go into Java 28 (next year, and preview version). Fingers crossed I'll manage to use null type safety in my lifetime.

NullAway with JSpecify annotations are a really good way to add null safety to Java applications. Even enforces nullability at the generic level.

Re: Java 27

#177

Post by PaulHoule »

gentlewater wrote: post #64
marginalia_nu wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all a bad choice. It's stable to the point of boring, and there's no shortage of people who know the language and can work with it, it's got best in class tooling, decades worth of libraries almost all very mature. Most of the language's issues are from legacy code bases coded in a style that isn't really relevant to a greenfield project.

It’s still missing null safety, right? Which means it’s still a hard no for me.

Really?

Unlike C it is trivial to catch a NullPointerException and confine the crash to the unit of work. And unlike C you are not talking about insanely dangerous pointers, you're just talking about an NPE.

I'll admit it's a hassle when something wasn't initialized properly and then you get a null pointer exception at some unrelated code much later. It's not always easy to debug. Catastrophic? No!

There are a lot of third party tools that can check for null safety and a lot of work is being done to make Java's initialization safer but also a little more flexible, there is

https://openjdk.org/jeps/8303099

and there are all sorts of practical answers. Nulls in Java are low on my list of annoyances, way behind front end programmers who pepper my CSS files with "!important" because they don't know about precedence (though maybe they think my .clazz.clazz.clazz selector is brain dead!)

Re: Java 27

#179

Post by ssimpson »

misiek08 wrote: post #150
pron wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They lack in performance, stability (compatibility), observability (telemetry), productivity, or some combination thereof. They are chosen, of course (especially C#; Go and Rust are far behind), but not as much as Java.

Saying that Go lacks in those is just showing how people are making software those days. It’s just terrifying. As to Rust - we all, hopefully, agree that it’s great language, but not for some startup making websites or Mongo based, boring backends. It’s great for the stable, system level products.

and the costs they are willing to pay. Go/Rust just kill everything else (except maybe C++) for performance and resource needs. JVM requires so many resources just to run small apps.

Re: Java 27

#180

Post by MBCook »

throwaway91033 wrote: post #58
petilon wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microsoft are bundling a lot more into the platform and leaving less to the community. This is a good thing. In Java everything has multiple community offerings, so before doing anything you have to evaluate the community offerings and decide which one to go with. If you go with the wrong one you may end up having to switch at some point, and that can be painful. This happens so often that most of the time spent wh…

If someone wants to create a project by assembling bits and pieces from different open source products they can, but many just go for Spring (Boot) and call it a day. All of my projects are based on Spring and I don't really have to look outside of that ecosystem. It almost acts as an aggregator of different open source solutions and often works by abstracting the functionality so that differences are not that big. I…

Yep. Anything else is probably in Apache Commons somewhere.
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