Java has decade(s) of cruft and breaking changes which LLMs were trained on. It'...

st3fan · 2026-03-03T02:34:17 1772505257

All you need is a JAVA_CODING_GUIDELINES.md with some hints about what kind of Java code you like the agent to write.

datsci_est_2015 · 2026-03-03T15:11:05 1772550665

All you need is [to encode all of the lessons you’ve learned about style and best practices over your entire career into a single markdown file].

Sorry, couldn’t help myself.

re-thc · 2026-03-03T11:48:52 1772538532

> Plus Go compilation speed/test running provides quick iteration for LLMs

How is Java slow in any of these? Plenty of tricks e.g. AppCDS before the tests.

roegerle · 2026-03-02T21:32:29 1772487149

breaking changes? hardly.

hu3 · 2026-03-02T21:44:27 1772487867

Yes, breaking changes. And many ways to do the same thing because the language kept evolving (thankfully).

nitwit005 · 2026-03-02T22:34:29 1772490869

There is a decently long list of breaking changes now. Removing JavaEE modules from the JDK, and restricting sun.misc.Unsafe, are the ones people usually run into.

gf000 · 2026-03-02T23:01:49 1772492509

These are relatively small-scoped library changes only though.

Meanwhile Go already had a language change, while being less than half its age (loop variable capture).

nitwit005 · 2026-03-02T23:16:58 1772493418

A long enough list of small changes eventually equates to a big change. People generally can't update applications from Java 8 or below to a new one without code updates.

gf000 · 2026-03-03T06:07:57 1772518077

Mostly an automatic updater call (for javax->jakarta) and a few dependency bumps away in the majority of cases.

Plain vanilla java code is really backwards compatible, on both a syntax, and on a binary level.

You can often find decades old jars on some random university site, working with JDK 25 with no issue.

waynesonfire · 2026-03-03T00:13:48 1772496828

If hadoop did it, so can you. I'm talking about a project that stretched Java 8 to, and arguably beyond, its intended operational boundaries. Unlikely that you’re leaning on this boundary. It's Spring Boot upgrades that will be giving you troubles.

nitwit005 · 2026-03-03T02:04:10 1772503450

They clearly did have Java version issues, as the different Hadoop versions list ranges of JDKs they're compatible with.