from Hacker News

What’s New Between Java 11 and Java 17? (2021)

by ptrik on 3/30/22, 2:30 AM with 24 comments

• by jicea on 3/30/22, 4:50 AM

  I’m a backend developper, working on medium to big Spring Boot apps. Two years ago, we introduced Kotlin in our code base with really good results on code quality.

  With Java 17, the gap is narrowing between Kotlin and Java. Kotlin has still unique features that I love (extension methods for instance), but the big one is nullability. You can use @Nullable/@NotNull annotations in Java but I largely prefer having nullability backed in types with Kotlin. Some people say nullability is not a problem: with 30 developers of various quality, I can ensure it is a problem. I don’t see Java addressing nullability in a better way in the near future, so I’m going to stick with Kotlin.

• by scubbo on 3/30/22, 4:28 AM

  Some great features here! Looking forward to when my team upgrades to Java 17 in 2035!

• by ibiza on 3/30/22, 4:06 AM

  Conveniences. Will Valhalla or Loom ever drop?

• by fulafel on 3/30/22, 4:15 AM

  It would be interesting to see qualitative surveys of new Java code that appears eg on Github that would give information about whether the real-world practice in Java is converging toward expressivity of higher level languages and reduced incidental complexity.

• by oaiey on 3/30/22, 4:45 AM

  It looks like C# and Java are now developed in parallel with the same features.

• by phobus on 3/30/22, 4:50 AM

  god i'm old