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QuestDB engineer here:
It's true that our non-idiomatic Java usage denies us some of the benefits typically associated with Java programming. Automatic memory management and the old "Write Once, Run Anywhere" paradigm are difficult to maintain due to our reliance on native libraries and manual memory management.
I see two classes of reasons for choosing Java:
1. Historical: The QuestDB codebase predates Rust. According to Wikipedia, the initial Rust release was in 2015. The oldest commit in the QuestDB repo is from 2014: https://github.com/questdb/questdb/commit/95b8095427c4e2c781... What were the options back in 2014? C++? Too complicated. C? Too low-level. Pretty much anything else? Either too slow or too exotic.
2. Technical: Java, even without GC or WORA, still offers some advantage.
The rust-maven-plugin we wrote indeed also supports JNA for these simple use cases.
https://github.com/questdb/rust-maven-plugin
Compared with JNA, JNI is indeed more complex, but it's faster and has more features. It also solves the problem of calling Java from Rust.
