Java's Comeback: From Aging Workhorse to Modern Contender

"An aging prizefighter, an old washed-up boxer. Everyone assumes his best days are behind him. And he enters the ring with a scrappy young upstart and loses... then goes into training and comes back stronger than ever. Sylvester Stallone stars as the Java Virtual Machine." That's how Josh Long, the most enthusiastic Java advocate you'll meet, frames the story of a language many wrote off a decade ago. Recorded live at Code Remix in Miami, this conversation covers Java's remarkable renaissance—new threading models that eliminate async/await, value types that promise C-like performance, and a serious push into AI territory that challenges Python's dominance.

Virtual Threads: Async Without the Awkwardness

The most significant change to hit Java in years is virtual threads, introduced as GA in Java 21. Here's the problem they solve: traditional operating system threads are expensive and limited. When your code does I/O—reading from a network socket, waiting for a database response—that thread sits idle, unavailable to anyone else. Languages like JavaScript and C# solved this with async/await, but that approach has a cost: it colors your functions. Call an async function, and your caller must also be async, propagating the annotation through your entire codebase.