Let’s run Rockstar programs on Quarkus! What could possibly go wrong?

Rockstar is an example of an “esoteric language,” designed to be interesting rather than intuitive, efficient or especially functional. Rockstar’s interesting feature is that its programs use the lyrical conventions of eighties rock ballads. Rockstar has been implemented in many languages, but not as a JVM language. This was clearly (clearly!) a gap that needed fixing, so Holly and Hanno have stepped in to make sure us JVM folks aren’t missing out. As a bonus, because “Bon Jova” is a JVM language, it can take advantage of Quarkus-y goodness. Along the way, a lot was learned about eighties music, classloaders, parsing, bytecode manipulation, and the important relationship between language style, syntax, and semantics.

There will be live coding, live singing and live guitar!