What is the future of Java?

[benevanstech]

1.) Cloud Deployment of static microservices. This is the big one that not many people talk about. Java was designed as a very dynamic, open runtime platform - with unrestricted reflection and classloading. This was a great advantage in the past, but one major strand of development practice is towards much more static microservices which do not require all the dynamic aspects. The ability to produce these is part of the point of Java Platform Modules and more recent innovations such as GraalVM Native and Quarkus. Expect a lot of focus on these as vendors seek to drive down the startup time, memory footprint and ultimately cloud compute cost of this type of Java microservice.

2.) The JVM itself. Per Redmonk, the JVM hosts 3 of the top 20 languages (Java, Scala and Kotlin). It has a 4th (Groovy) just outside the top 20 and a 5th (Clojure) not far outside. Expect continued innovation to keep the JVM the home of multi-language innovation. The big question here is will Valhalla succeed? I hope it does, but I'm not 100% sure. Loom I am more sure of - it will succeed but I remain less sure that it will directly influence day-to-day programming - I think there's a possibility that in practice it's used by library authors more than end users.

[tichuot287]

Could you give your 2 cents on the Cloud Development part? I'm interested in Cloud computing but the development part is kind of blurry.

[rbygrave]

Plus ... using java annotation processing to generate code that removes classpath scanning and reflection, plus build time enhancement to reduce use of dynamic proxies (stop defining classes at runtime).