Can Java be more performant than Rust? Andrew Lombardi has the numbers

Hi, Spring fans! What happens when a longtime Kotlin and JVM fan - my friend Andrew Lombardi - decides to take on the latest “rewrite everything in Rust” hype with AI in the driver’s seat? In this episode, Josh sits down with community legend Andrew Lombardi for a fast, funny, and deeply technical conversation about his wild experiment: porting a real application to Kotlin to see how it stacks up against the much-hyped Rust rewrite.

Andrew breaks down what sparked the project, why the original benchmark caused such a stir, and how AI made what would once have been an unthinkable rewrite suddenly feel like a practical weekend challenge. Along the way, he digs into token costs, benchmarking pitfalls, caching surprises, framework parity, JVM performance, memory tradeoffs, and why Kotlin’s readability and type system make it a compelling choice for large systems.

If you care about performance, architecture, AI-assisted development, or just want to hear two seasoned developers gleefully dissect a spicy tech controversy, this one is absolutely worth a listen.