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Comment by srazzaque | Hacker News Reader

> It's basically all vanilla Java

Have you considered rewriting it in rust? ;)

In all seriousness, it's great to see something written in a "boring" language like Java, which seems to get a lot of hate in developer circles, hover at the top of HN.

Java really can perform amazingly well, especially if you minimise the use of unneeded libraries and frameworks. Super curious to see how your stack evolves as you get more load.

Best of luck to you on the journey!

Ps there's truly a world of difference between "Spring Boot Developer" and "Software Engineer with Java experience". I suspect a lot of people who hate Java or think it performs badly have only worked with the former group of people.

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I'm a believer in the conservation of cool. You can build something cool in a boring language, or build something mundane in a cool language.

Java gets a lot of shit, some of it is merited but a lot of it isn't really fair to the language. There's a lot of Java developers that are kinda shit-tier copy-paste developers developing shit-tier copy-paste applications, because the language is so forgiving as to accommodate that, but it's also a competent language that you can do seriously impressive things with.

You can be insanely productive in Java because it's extremely stable and mature. You almost never have to deal with library churn or other upstream changes that urgently needs to be fixed. I can think of exactly two instances in my professional life that's happened, migrating off Java 1.8 and the oh-shit moment of needing to patch log4shell.

Did you look at http://github.com/tinspin/rupy?

Which version of Java are you running?

I'm on 18, but will upgrade to 21 when it drops. Not really felt the need to upgrade to 19 or 20 as they haven't provided any features I'm interested in.

Over 10 years of professional java (right from ejb madness of early 2000s through the last few years of spring annotation hell) taught me the balance to using java in personal (or startup) projects is simply to stick to core java features and the bare minimum libraries and being very skeptical to the hot air coming from outside the community.

My code from late 2000s, with very few modifications to keep up with modern java syntax, writren in bare java talking to postgres in just raw sql runs circles around anything new I've tried or built with for modern web application backend stacks.

IDE support is top class. Thread are just awesome when done right. Static types make code incredibly easy to read and reason about even years later. JVM has been super stable forever. A whole lot of features I need are just baked right into the language, but not obvious at first. Mvn just works. And my reluctance to external libraries actually made me write the logic myself making me much better understand related concerns.

Congratulations and I wish more cool projects picked Java as their language, but I see them use Oracle's ownership as the strawman argument against it. I don't know enough about that.

Personally, I owe a lot to Java.

Haha, that's fairly similar to my career as well. It really is severely slept on as a language.

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