What are the limitations of Java?

If you are a Java developer, you already know the power of Java. But have you ever thought about What are the limitations of Java? If you have attended any of the Core Java Developer interviews, you may have come across this question because this is one of the common questions that pop up in such kinds of technical interviews.

Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.

by Alan Kay

I think Java do justice to the above statement. But not fully.

Java is too wordy.

Java Java is verbose than other languages like C++. And that makes java easy to learn and understand. For example, to derive a class from a parent class Java use “extend” keyword but in C++ it’s just “:”. I think Java prefer keywords over syntax. Some can say this is an advantage while others say this is a disadvantage of Java. The latest versions of Java IDEs like IntelliJ, Netbeans, and Eclipse are auto-completing these long keywords and syntax so it can reduce the development time.

//Hello World in Java
public class Test {
    public static void main(String args[]) {
          System.out.println("Hello, World");
    }
}

//Hello World in Python
print("Hello World")

//Hello World in C++
#include 

int main()
{
    std::cout << "Hello, world!\n";
    return 0;
}

Java Garbage Collector

The garbage collector is one of the best features in the Java programming language. Because of it, developers don't need to understand the concepts of memory allocations and memory cleaning of the system. For most of the cases, GC is an advantage. But when it comes to large applications, this non-deterministic operation of the GC caused some unexpected performance issues in the system from time to time.

XML Configurations

In every Java related frameworks like Spring, EJB, Hibernate use XML configuration. This feels something like overdoing to achieve some basic tasks. We may have to have a different XML file configuration for each environment. But with new versions of those frameworks support annotations for those configurations, but even that caused some issues because some can do it using annotations and some can do it with XML but who can select in which case we need annotations and in which case we need XML configurations. This normally comes under Limitations of Java, but for me, this is one of a drawback.

Not easy to learn for beginners

Java looks very difficult for beginners not because they can't understand the language but the concepts behind the language. As you know even for the Hello world program beginners have to understand the class and static method concept. Also, Java designed and forced to use OOP concepts, beginners can't grasp the true value of those concepts until they stick with the language for a long period of time.

Not support low-level programming

Java is platform-independent and it runs on a Java Virtual Machine, Which is a container, not the operating system itself. Therefore it does not support low-level programming features.

Conclusion

Most non-Java people tend to think that Java is slow compared to other OOP languages but that is true only for the previous version of Java. Now Java is a mature language and it can compete with other languages when it comes to performance.

Only these are the things that I can think of when it comes to limitations of Java.

• Java is too wordy.
• No control over Java Garbage Collector
• All frameworks need a lot of XML Configurations
• Not easy to learn for beginners
• Not support low-level programming

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