Hello Beam dev community, For those who don't know me, I work for Google and I've been working on the Java reference runner, which is a portable, local Java runner (it's basically the direct runner with the portability APIs implemented). Our goal in working on this was to have a portable runner which ran locally so it could be used by users for testing portable pipelines, devs for testing new features with portability, and for runner authors to provide a simple reference implementation of a portable runner.
Due to various circumstances though, progress on the Java reference runner has been pretty slow, and a Python runner which does pretty much the same things was made to aid portability development in Python (called the FnApiRunner). This runner is currently further along in feature work than the Java reference runner, so we've been reevaluating if we should switch to investing in it instead. My question to the community is: Which runner do you think would be more valuable to the dev community and Beam users? For those of you who are runner authors, do you have a preference for what language you'd like to see a reference implementation in? Thanks, Daniel Oliveira
