Zero Waste, Radical Magic, and Italian Graft – Quarkus Efficiency Secrets by Holly Cummins

Quarkus achieves efficiency through build-time processing instead of runtime, moving heavy lifting to compile time while maintaining developer experience

The framework challenges traditional assumptions about dynamism being beneficial - in 2024’s container world, dynamic runtime behavior often creates unnecessary overhead

Quarkus uses “offline reflection” via Jandex to optimize performance, allowing frameworks to participate in the build process rather than doing work at runtime

Developer experience (“developer joy”) is prioritized alongside machine efficiency - fast startup times, live coding, and immediate feedback loops without sacrificing performance

Applications start in milliseconds and have high deployment density due to low memory footprint, competing with Node.js and Go while maintaining Java’s benefits

The reactive core is optional but provides performance benefits even for developers not writing reactive code - “The Quarkus team write reactive code so you don’t have to”

Build-time optimizations include class scanning, annotation processing, and bytecode generation, eliminating repeated work during startup

Performance improvements come from challenging assumptions and finding opportunities to optimize, like fixing cache pollution bugs that improved throughput by 3x

The framework aims to avoid tradeoffs between human efficiency and machine efficiency, providing both good developer experience and runtime performance

Strong typing, compile-time processing, and optional magic (rather than forced framework conventions) help prevent errors while maintaining flexibility