A Bootiful Podcast Cay Horstmaan, legendary Java professor, author, lecturer
Mar 19, 2026
Cay Horstmann, longtime CS professor and author of Core Java, shares hands-on experiments with WebAssembly and why it is not yet production-ready. He talks Java 25 performance gains, Valhalla progress, virtual threads simplifying concurrency, and why Java remains strong for long-lived business systems. He also reflects on teaching choices and plans for an interactive, frequently updated book.
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Modern Java Matches Concision And Outperforms Scripting
- Josh Long argues modern Java is as expressive and concise as other languages while being much faster in many cases.
- He suggests renaming Java would reveal its strengths and points to JVM performance advantages over Node and Python.
Live Demo: Full Spring Boot App In Three Minutes
- Josh Long built a secure Spring Boot app onstage that integrated AI, passkeys, database auth, observability and AOT in three minutes.
- He generated a start.spring app, added Spring AI/OpenAI, WebAuthn passkeys, encoded DB passwords, and used Leyden AOT to start in ~0.5s.
Avoid Relying On Java WebAssembly For Production Today
- Cay Horstmann warns WebAssembly support for Java is not yet plug-and-play and advised caution before using it for real projects.
- He built demos that worked until runtime gaps (like GC support) and found many edge cases when calling WASM modules from Java.
