Project Valhalla, Explained: How a Decade of Work Arrives in JDK 28

> Neglected and unloved till JDK 8, its basically been playing catch up.

These two statements are contradictory. The last Java version under Sun was in 2006. Oracle bought Sun in 2010. JDK 7 came out in 2011 and JDK 8 in 2014.

The team largely remained the same, and the main difference was that Oracle ended the neglect and funded us more, which is why Java picked up the pace after the acquisition.

> its basically been playing catch up.

Catch up with who or what? There are only two languages in the world as popular as Java or more: JS/TS, and Python. People who are saying Java is "playing catch up" usually compare it to languages that are doing far, far worse than Java. It's just that people who like certain features think that the language that has them is doing poorly despite them and not because of them. Many times I see people insist that other languages are "doing it right" (or better than Java) even though it is clear that the people who say this are in the minority when it comes to preferred features.

> So when people say "oh so its now got structs or value types of X", yes it has but that's because it has been stunted in its development due to big bureaucratic and hostile corporate processes, but its free now and is getting love through the OpenJDK family.

If anything, the opposite is the case. Managers love to see things ship quickly. It is our technical leadership - all people who were there in the Sun days - who insist we have to move deliberately and carefully and get things right. You can agree or disagree with the decisions, but comparing Java unfavourably to languages that are doing far worse is unconvincing.

Rather, what I think the vibe is because Java is not as popular as it was in, say, 2003. And it certainly isn't. But guess what? No other language is, either, because that time was anomalous not only for Java, but for the entire software ecosystem, which had never been as consolidated and unfragmented before or since.

And that across 2819 commits.

Wow, that’s insane.

Second, working in C# felt clunky, as if every other thing was done to check the checkbox "done" and the author called it the day once it sorta kinda worked. There was some additional syntactic sugar in that language that was nice, but it did not made that much difference in practice and I don't miss it after coming back to java.

Third, I found the obsession with bashing java by people who have no idea how java projects look like and which problems they have annoying.