Really? What JVM tooling amazes you, specifically?

Everything that isn’t Java is top notch. JIT, GCs, debugging. It’s sad that Java the language sucked so bad for this long.

That is a matter of opinion, plenty of people like Java, the language.

Java today is a likable language. It was not expressive enough a few years ago which lead to major boilerplate copypasta and making do with abhorrent ’design patterns’ instead of well designed language features.

Plenty of people liked it then I agree, can’t really understand why, because the simplicity argument just moved the complexity into libraries.

Java was the Go of its time, specially when compared with the chaos of commercial C and C++ compilers.

Java predates ISO C++, and the UNIX world was a mess of K&R C, and half backed ISO C89.

Design patterns were invented for Smalltalk and C++, as much as people like to blame Java for them.

Does anyone know if you could target the JVM without having to use UTF-16 for string encoding?

Probably not justified, but that’s a hassle I’d want to avoid if I had any plans to support Unicode.