State of the Art of Java in 2026 • Ben Evans • GOTO 2026

This interview was recorded for GOTO State of the Art in March 2026. #GOTOcon #GOTO
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Ben Evans - Senior Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat & Co-Author of "Optimizing Cloud Native Java" and many more Books

Read the full transcription of this interview here:
https://gotopia.tech/articles/439

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Links
https://newrelic.com/resources/report/2024-state-of-the-java-ecosystem
https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2025/06/18/language-rankings-1-25
https://www.stepsecurity.io/blog/hackerbot-claw-github-actions-exploitation
https://stripe.dev/blog/minions-stripes-one-shot-end-to-end-coding-agents
https://openjdk.org/jeps/8305968
https://openjdk.org/jeps/353
https://openjdk.org/jeps/416
https://developer.ibm.com/articles/j-ffm
https://openjdk.org/jeps/8350458
https://openjdk.org/jeps/8303099

DESCRIPTION
In this GOTO State of the Art episode, Java Champion and Red Hat Senior Principal Software Engineer Ben Evans delivers a sweeping, data-driven audit of Java's health in 2026 — and the picture is far healthier than the tech press would have you believe. Server-side Java workloads have roughly doubled in the last seven years, developer wages are stable (unlike JavaScript, which is heading south), Java has been in the top four programming languages for twelve consecutive years, and the entire cloud-native infrastructure stack — Kafka, Cassandra, Spark, OpenTelemetry, Keycloak — runs on it. The real insight is mathematical: explosive growth of a small language base is still dwarfed by modest growth of Java's enormous installed base. Java isn't dying; it's just not shiny enough to get clicks.

The meat of the talk is a masterclass in Java's architecture and roadmap. Ben unpacks the fundamental tension between dynamism (the JVM's Lisp-and-Smalltalk-heritage runtime) and integrity (modern security demands that restrict unchecked internal API access), before walking through the near and far future: Project Valhalla's value types (the most fundamental change to Java ever — bigger than generics or lambdas), the Vector API waiting on Valhalla to land, nullability markers, ahead-of-time compilation, and beyond that, type classes and Project Babylon.

His honest take on AI tooling is sharp: great for greenfield, genuinely poor at architectural reasoning and version-specific code, and only a real productivity multiplier for teams who already have solid engineering practices. Oh, and it's a wolf in sheep's clothing — the JVM's dynamism makes it way closer to Lisp than to C++, and Java's philosophy of "boring done right" turns out to be an excellent foundation for AI-era enterprise software.

TIMECODES
00:00 Intro
00:35 Agenda
02:26 Current status
20:22 Java's philosophy & evolution
25:20 Dynamism
30:32 Integrity
33:52 Near future
38:53 Frontiers
40:03 Outro

RECOMMENDED BOOKS
Ben Evans & Jim Gough • Optimizing Cloud Native Java • https://amzn.to/41nivD9
Ben Evans, Jason Clark & David Flanagan • Java in a Nutshell • https://amzn.to/43FDoMA
Ben Evans, Martijn Verburg & Jason Clark • The Well-Grounded Java Developer • https://amzn.to/41JMG7N
Ben Evans, Jim Gough & Chris Newland • Optimizing Java • https://amzn.to/4bNOfGh
Ben Evans & Martijn Verburg • The Well-Grounded Java Developer • https://amzn.to/4hs9MWk

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