This blog post is a step-by-step guide that shows you the basic usage of KAConf, an Annotation-based configuration system inspired in the wonderful Spring Boot, but simpler, lighter, not so magic, and independent of any large framework, with no transitive dependencies.
In my previous blog post I evaluated the feasibility of Java for lightweight system programming thanks to the GraalVM native image generation tool. Despite the initial results look promising, I felt disappointed when they pointed me out that GraalVM does not support reflection by default (which IMHO is a wonderful and powerful tool to enhance the expressiveness of our software and to reduce boilerplate). However, you can actually configure the ahead-of-time compiler to incorporate a user-provided reflection metadata.
There is still a common belief about Java being slow (especially during the startup) and memory-consuming, making it not being the first option for ephemeral service instances, like containers. This blog post pretends to put some light on those assertions, quantifying the impact of a last-generation JVM in a simple, single-threaded, application. We compare the impact of the JVM measuring the execution time and memory spent of a Java QuickSort implementation, comparing it with the execution of a native image generated with the modern GraalVM Ahead-Of-Time (AOT) compiler and the same QuickSort implementation in Go.
After almost two years without updating this blog, I have changed the Markdown processor from Blackfriday to Goldmark, which includes an extension to highlight the code syntax according to the Alec Thomas' Chroma engine and styles.
Despite copying a struct with several fields is slower than copying a pointer to the same struct, returning a struct value may be faster than returning a pointer if we consider escape analysis particularities.
This post briefly explains how the blog is organized, and how to create new posts and templates.
This is the first post of my great blog.