SFEIR at FOSDEM
Last month, Mario Martín Santana has been to the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting, also known as the FOSDEM.
Since he's been there for the two days, he decided to bring us through his journey and give us his feedbacks !
Have a look at his article right here ??
I went to my first FOSDEM last month. It took place the weekend of the 4th and 5th February at the ULB (French speaking university). It’s a free event and so was the coffee during Sunday morning :)
I was expecting to be among the first ones when I arrived on Sunday at 8h45… but there were already about 30 people in the OpenJDK conference room, and that was just one of the many DevRooms available. The first talk seemed well chosen: “After Nearly 30 Years, How Is Java So Popular?”. I found the format of the conference quite ambitious: 20 minutes talks with 5 minutes break between each session from 9AM to 5PM but it went well.
The talks were about the actual state and the future of Java. Java has been traditionally used in servers that run nonstop. But for a few years now, with technologies such as AWS lambdas and containers, the startup time becomes critical: the cost is related to the execution time. The response time is also important for reactive programming.
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We can reduce the startup time just by upgrading the Java version, which also brings a better response time and less memory consumption. Improvements in the garbage collector help a lot and even more for containerised applications.
There were some talks around this topic, such as Piranha Cloud, GraalVM and Quarkus. GraalVM prepares a native binaries with everything already loaded and ready to run, so no need to load the JVM, the classes, verify the bytecode, etc. In addition to this, GraalVM only loads the classes needed by the call tree. Quarkus is a good alternative to Spring that uses GraalVM to start up faster and consume less memory (even though Spring Boot now supports GraalVM too).
Kotlin had its own devroom, but there was one talk that sneaked into the OpenJDK room: “What I Miss In Java (The Perspectives Of A Kotlin Developer)”.
It’s nice to see that some of the Kotlin bonuses make their way into Java, such as the data classes available in Java as records since version 14. However, there are still some others only available in Kotlin, like the nullable references. In Kotlin we just need to add ? after the type to mark the reference as nullable. So references are by default… yes, non nullable!
In Java we can use annotations such as @Nullable or @NonNull, but I find them not so friendly and they are not even standard.
It was nice to go back to university, the atmosphere at the café, the food trucks for breakfast and lunch, waffles, crêpes, croissants, hamburgers, pizza, and beer. I will definitely be there next year to hear about the future and the improvements of Java and other languages !