State of the Art of Java in 2026 • Ben Evans

This interview was recorded for GOTO State of the Art in March 2026.https://gotopia.techBen Evans - Senior Principal SW Engineer at Red Hat & Co-Author of "Optimizing Cloud Native Java" & many more BooksRead the full transcription of this interview here:https://gotopia.tech/articles/439RESOURCESBenhttps://mastodon.social/@kittylysthttps://bsky.app/profile/ogkittylyst.bsky.socialhttps://github.com/kittylysthttps://www.linkedin.com/in/kittylysthttps://www.kittylyst.comLinkshttps://newrelic.com/resources/report/2024-state-of-the-java-ecosystemhttps://redmonk.com/sogrady/2025/06/18/language-rankings-1-25https://www.stepsecurity.io/blog/hackerbot-claw-github-actions-exploitationhttps://stripe.dev/blog/minions-stripes-one-shot-end-to-end-coding-agentshttps://openjdk.org/jeps/8305968https://openjdk.org/jeps/353https://openjdk.org/jeps/416https://developer.ibm.com/articles/j-ffmhttps://openjdk.org/jeps/8350458https://openjdk.org/jeps/8303099DESCRIPTIONIn 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 BOOKSBen Evans & Jim Gough • Optimizing Cloud Native Java • https://amzn.to/41nivD9Ben Evans, Jason Clark & David Flanagan • Java in a Nutshell • https://amzn.to/43FDoMABlueskyInstagramLinkedInFacebookCHANNEL MEMBERSHIP BONUSJoin this channel to get early access to videos & other perks:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs_tLP3AiwYKwdUHpltJPuA/joinLooking for a unique learning experience?Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket: gotopia.techSUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL - new videos posted daily!