Ben Evans is an author, architect and educator. He is currently Observability Lead and Senior Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat Runtimes.
Previously he was Lead Architect for Instrumentation at New Relic, and co-founded jClarity, a performance tools startup acquired by Microsoft. He has also worked as Chief Architect for Listed Derivatives at Deutsche Bank and as Senior Technical Instructor for Morgan Stanley. He served for 6 years on the Java Community Process Executive Committee, helping define new Java standards.
He is a Java Champion and 3-time JavaOne Rockstar Speaker. Ben is the author of six books, including "Optimizing Cloud Native Java" (O'Reilly), the new editions of “Java in a Nutshell” and the recently-updated “The Well-Grounded Java Developer” (Maning) and his technical articles are read by thousands of developers every month.
Ben is a regular speaker and educator on topics such as the Java platform, systems architecture, performance and concurrency for companies and conferences all over the world.
In 2022, I presented "Do We Really Do FP in Java?", a discussion of the language features of Java that support functional programming. We concluded that while many of the basic building blocks of FP are available, and it is very possible to write Java in an FP-style there are still some important gaps compared to fully-featured "true" FP languages such as Haskell or Scala.
Since that time, there have been important developments in Java's FP capabilities, and more are on the horizon, including some updates that address gaps that seemed very difficult or impossible in 2022.
This talk therefore briefly recaps our conclusions from last time, and then dives into what has changed since then, up to and including Java 24 (due for release in March 2025). Our topics include things such as Java's version of algebraic data types, the increasing power of Java pattern matching and ongoing work to incrementally improve features that are already successful.
Towards the end of the talk we'll discuss the future - in particular including some of Java's major in-flight projects, which are changing fundamental aspects of the language and platform - and see how they tie up with FP. This will especially include Project Valhalla, Project Amber and Structured Concurrency. We'll also reconsider the question of whether Java has "closed the FP gap" with languages like Kotlin, Scala and Clojure.
* Summary of 2022 talk
* What has changed
* The situation for Java 24 (& 25)
* The Future
* Conclusions
The two main services that any JVM provides are (mostly) hands-free memory management and an easy-to-use container for managed execution of application code. In this talk, Ben Evans will explain what the term "managed execution" really means, how that concept has evolved in the 30 years since Java was first released, and where it is going.
We currently live in exciting times, as the transition to Cloud-first invalidates quite a few of the assumptions that were baked into Java's initial design. The classical picture of interpreted bytecode -> JIT compilation (& warmup -> steady state) no longer satisfies.
There are a number of efforts to respond to this, and we will try to address as many of them as we can during the talk. Of particular interest is build-time shifting - as seen in technologies like Quarkus, as well as the concept of constraining dynamism as is being developed in Project Leyden.
* A brief history of Java program execution
* Dynamism and the Open World
* What changes the Cloud has brought
* Immutable images
* Livestock not pets
* Responses
* AOT (& Mechanism vs Outcomes)
* Quarkus
* Project Leyden
* A wildcard - iOS?
* The situation in 2025
* The Future - standardisation?
* Conclusions
In this session, Ben Evans will lead a group discussion about retro game development in Java, with his recent experience resurrecting some Java game libraries (and developing a Java game for the Devoxx arcade) as a case study. If you're interested in gamedev or code archaeology then come along and join the discussion.
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