Reactive Streams in Java : Drawbacks

[Aysenur Eroglu]

Hello,

Reactive programming is popular. Since Java 8, functional programming style is really loved, especially streams. This topic is attractive.

But everything has drawbacks. When shouldn't we use reactive streams?

Thanks in advance,
Ayşenur.

[Adam L Davis]

Good question.

The drawbacks are in overhead and complication. For example, Exception stack traces will become very large and confusing.

You should not use reactive streams for any application that already works well without it. For example do not use it for something that is single threaded and does make a lot of blocking method calls. Also don't use it if using a ExecutorService would work just as well. https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/util/concurrent/ExecutorService.html

It works well for complex, high traffic, multi-threaded applications with a mix of computation and blocking calls that need close to real-time latency and response times.