Concise, clean, effective and without cruft. That's the main reason for Golangs unstoppable growth.
Java is a language and computing platform from the 90s and it shows. It really needs to just stop and the mess around licensing only serves to help kill it.
I also wouldn't tout the concurrency of Java over Golang - having the concurrency model baked into the language and runtime means a clear advantage for Go and one which simplifies the communication among different agents.
I have used both in production, and Java/JVM is far superior.
Concise is not a word I'd use to describe golang. I can't count how many times I've come across code that would be 1 or 2 lines in Java compared to 15 lines or more in golang. It's quite ironic given the unsubstantiated claims around golang. Lots cruft with "if err != nil" littered everywhere is barely scratching the surface.
Java is getting a green thread implementation by means of project Loom. However, the JVM already handles very high concurrency systems in production by using libraries like Akka, Vertx, and Reactor. It is already used by major corporations to handle extremely high load systems. It's already proven itself over decades.
I don't know what you mean by Java being a computing platform from the 90s. If anything, golang is at a similar level as Java when it was first released (no generics), except worse (error prone error handling, poor design of interfaces, and many bad and unsubstantiated design decisions). Not to mention the JVM having state of the art GC, as well as performing optimizations way beyond what golang is capable of.
OpenJDK is fully open source, no licensing there. Not only that, but Oracle has open sourced previously closed source projects pertaining to the JVM and tooling around it.
The main reason for golang is the hype behind it. Proof is that some of the same authors worked on its predecessor a long time ago, and nothing ever came out of it because they didn't have the Google brand behind them. People today follow hype without substantiation.
You're arguing a lot of abstract points here but let's have a walkthrough...
> I have used both in production
likewise, and I have found the opposite stance for Java/JVM based applications.
Terrible deployment story, terrible amount of tweaking and JVM "hacks".
> Java is getting a green thread implementation by means of project Loom
Well done to Java. It's getting features already commonplace in Golang. Bolting on Akka, Vertx... yeah, enjoy your frankensteins monster lol.
> no generics
Generics _arent_ critical for a language, exceptions are a mess and as for the JVM being state of the art... yeah. In the 90s it was.
> The main reason for golang is the hype behind it
I just fundamentally disagree - if that was truly the case, I'd have adopted Java back when it was hyped and relevant and would've moved onto Rust by now from Golang which never happened.
> Terrible deployment story, terrible amount of tweaking and JVM "hacks".
A lot of people these days are building fat/uber jars. All it takes to run your code is `java -jar foo.jar`. Can't get much simpler than that.
Tweaking is a plus that golang doesn't offer. The JVM runs an extremely wide range of workloads, and gives you the ability to tune it accordingly, e.g. whether you care more about throughput vs latency. Compared to golang where this is extremely limited.
It's not surprising that a huge number of data processing workloads run on the JVM (regardless of implementation language).
> Bolting on Akka, Vertx... yeah, enjoy your frankensteins monster lol.
That's not an argument. These frameworks are mature and battle tested, not to mention built on sound principles (e.g. Akka is similar to Erlang's actor model, which includes supervisor capability and remoting - nothing like this exists in golang).
> Generics _arent_ critical for a language, exceptions are a mess
They're not critical in the same way "functions/procedures" are not critical, but you're going to end up with a messy code base when it comes to reality. Again, the number of times I've seen what amounts to map/filter calls littering the code base, making it more difficult to read (not to mention error prone) is too many to count. Generics fix this. Funnily enough, it's golang that chose to disregard best practices from the 70s.
> and as for the JVM being state of the art... yeah. In the 90s it was.
Tell that to Google, FB, Apple, Amazon, and many more who run their critical infrastructure on the JVM. The introspection and monitoring it provides is literally second to none, not to mention performance, tunability, hot-swapping, rich ecosystem, and many more.
> I just fundamentally disagree
You can, but the fact remains that some of the same authors worked on a golang predecessor which never went anywhere, precisely because it didn't have the Google name behind it.
Java is a language and computing platform from the 90s and it shows. It really needs to just stop and the mess around licensing only serves to help kill it.
I also wouldn't tout the concurrency of Java over Golang - having the concurrency model baked into the language and runtime means a clear advantage for Go and one which simplifies the communication among different agents.
Please learn some basics.