Java is very much what you make of it. Spring Boot tends to pull in everything and the kitchen sink, and the atrocious build and start times are a fairly logica

Java is very much what you make of it. Spring Boot tends to pull in everything and the kitchen sink, and the atrocious build and start times are a fairly logical consequence. Vanilla Java can be very quick to start and build, especially if you do incremental builds. In my search engine project which is ~50kloc I have incremental builds that can be as fast as 1-2 seconds including running all pertinent tests[1], and the start time for the stuff that doesn't like populate an 12 Gb hashmap in memory upon start-up is also single digit seconds. [1] A clean rebuild is 37 seconds; 108 seconds with a full suite of tests. That's fairly tolerable IMO. I've horror stories of Java builds that have had compile times anywhere between 15 and 45 minutes.