Oracle slashes 30k jobs with a cold 6 a.m. email

Re:Oracle slashes 30k jobs with a cold 6 a.m. email by tombert on Tuesday March 31, 2026 @12:13PM (#47589581)

I worked for a drug discovery company doing Java [1] since we were using Kafka Streams very liberally, but everything was done with the OpenJDK Temurin distribution. It was drilled into our heads on the first day do not install anything from Oracle. I think they were afraid of some weird lawsuit unless they bought an expensive license.

I totally get it, but it made me a bit sad because they were even weary of something like GraalVM for some projects where startup time was becoming an issue; I think the Community Edition for GraalVM would have been fine but I think they had this "we don't touch anything with an the Oracle name directly attached with a ten foot pole". Which is totally fair.

[1] It's not hard to find which one but I politely ask that you do not post it here in relation to this thread.

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Re:Oracle slashes 30k jobs with a cold 6 a.m. email by mort96 on Tuesday March 31, 2026 @12:34PM (#47589920)

I'm sure GraalVM is nice enough technology but I don't understand why anyone would actively choose to use a JVM from Oracle if they can avoid it.

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Re:Oracle slashes 30k jobs with a cold 6 a.m. email by tombert on Tuesday March 31, 2026 @01:11PM (#47590468)

The Ahead of Time compilation is pretty nice for some stuff. Generally startup time is significantly improved, so if you're writing command line tools in particular it can be cool.

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Re:Oracle slashes 30k jobs with a cold 6 a.m. email by mort96 on Tuesday March 31, 2026 @04:23PM (#47592960)

Most languages I write are ahead of time compiled with pretty good startup time so it's not really a need I have that I feel GraalVM solves?

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Re:Oracle slashes 30k jobs with a cold 6 a.m. email by tombert on Wednesday April 01, 2026 @01:40PM (#47604042)

Yes but Java has historically had pretty long startup times. If you want to write Java specifically then GraalVM is probably still the best option for AOT.

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Re:Oracle slashes 30k jobs with a cold 6 a.m. email by pjmlp on Wednesday April 01, 2026 @02:07AM (#47597398)

OpenJDK is from Oracle as well.

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Re:Oracle slashes 30k jobs with a cold 6 a.m. email by vips7L on Tuesday March 31, 2026 @12:53PM (#47590206)

HotSpot also has lots of things to speed up start time. Project Leyden has made a lot of advancements. AOTCache and crac etc.

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