Ben Evans on Java 9

In this episode of the O’Reilly Programming Podcast, I talk with Ben Evans, co-founder and technology fellow at JClarity, and co-author of the forthcoming O’Reilly book Optimizing Java: Practical Techniques for Improved Performance Tuning. We discuss the upcoming release of Java 9, Java performance issues, and Evans’ experience as an organizer for the London Java Community.

Discussion points:

• While praising the engineering work that’s been done for Java 9, Evans says he sees “nothing desperately compelling” to encourage developers to upgrade. “It’s a fairly bare cupboard for developers who want new productivity features,” he says.
• That said, Evans sees Java 9 as a stepping stone that will possibly enable radical new features to be delivered in Java 10 and 11.  “It would not surprise me to see a world where very few people make the jump from 8 to 9, and a lot of people go straight from 8 to 10,” he says.
• We discuss the controversy surrounding the Java Platform Module System, Project Jigsaw, which has led to the delay of the release of Java 9.
• On the topic of measuring Java performance numbers, Evans cautions against microbenchmarking. “Over optimizing for microbenchmarks is actually harmful,” he says, noting Google’s recent decision to retire the Octane benchmark.

Other links:

• The video course Introduction to Java 8, presented by Ben Evans and Martjin Verburg
• The video course Practical Scala for Java Developers, presented by Julian Templeman and Ben Evans
• The Learning Path Beginning Java Second Edition
• Evans’ recent InfoQ article “Under the Hood with the JVM’s Automatic Resource Management”