GraalVM 21.0 Released With Experimental JVM On Truffle

[Ungweliante]

This puts it back to the age-old dilemma: do you spend your limited resources optimizing for machine efficiency or for developer efficiency? Any non-GC language is going to be better for a microservice than a GC one from a machine efficiency point of view, the question is do you want to spend your resources on the more expensive developers needed to successfully pull that off, or would you rather rely on a Java cattle-call? Picking Java means you're going to pay more for the actual running of the service over its lifetime, the question then becomes what percentage of that vs. the additional startup cost to get it written in another language. For a good percentage of services (perhaps a majority), the development costs are more important than the execution costs. Unless your microservice requires Google-like scalability, there are more than enough options with Java that make it "good enough" even though there are gains to be made operationally going another way.

Golang is GC and ideal for microservices.

Java's performance is actually quite good for long-lived services, the JIT makes wonders. The problem comes when you have lots of small things and the JVM weight becomes significant.

Red Hat is pushing Quarkus like crazy lately in their dev channels, maybe it can be a solution to use Java in those small projects.