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What are the risks with Project Lombok?


I'm coming up with performance goals for the new year, and I thought I'd be fun to put a goal to reduce the size of the code base, especially boilerplate. One action I've come up with to address this is to use Project Lombok to make beans as short as they should be. But I have a habit of overlooking downsides to new software and approaches, so I'm relying on the Stack Overflow community: Can anyone tell me why Lombok is a bad idea?


Solution

  • A major downside is IDE support. Since Lombok is not actually a language change, and since your IDE only understands java, you will need an IDE that supports Lombok to get things working right. As of now, that's only Eclipse that includes Eclipse and IntelliJ. If you use eclipse that might be ok, but remember that you are making a decision for future developers as well.

    I'd suggest you consider moving some of your code into a less ceremonial language such as groovy. We've had success moving some of our business logic and models into groovy and it works really smoothly.