GOTO - The Brightest Minds in Tech
The GOTO podcast seeks out the brightest and boldest ideas from language creators and the world's leading experts in software development in the form of interviews and conference talks. Tune in to get the inspiration you need to bring in new technologies or gain extra evidence to support your software development plan.
GOTO - The Brightest Minds in Tech
State of the Art of Java in 2026 • Ben Evans
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
This interview was recorded for GOTO State of the Art in March 2026.
https://gotopia.tech
Ben Evans - Senior Principal SW Engineer at Red Hat & Co-Author of "Optimizing Cloud Native Java" & many more Books
Read the full transcription of this interview here:
https://gotopia.tech/articles/439
RESOURCES
Ben
https://mastodon.social/@kittylyst
https://bsky.app/profile/ogkittylyst.bsky.social
https://github.com/kittylyst
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kittylyst
https://www.kittylyst.com
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, Java Champion & Red Hat Senior Principal SW 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 7 years, developer wages are stable (unlike JavaScript, which is heading south), Java has been in the top 4 programming languages for 12 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.
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
Bluesky
Instagram
LinkedIn
Facebook
CHANNEL MEMBERSHIP BONUS
Join this channel to get early access to videos & other perks:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs_tLP3AiwYKwdUHpltJPuA/join
Looking for a unique learning experience?
Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket: gotopia.tech
SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL - new videos posted daily!