Project Loom: Modern Scalable Concurrency for the Java Platform By Alan Bateman

Concurrent applications, those serving multiple independent application actions simultaneously, are the bread and butter of Java server-side programming. Project Loom was created to explore, incubate and deliver Java VM features and APIs built on top of them for the purpose of supporting easy-to-use, high-throughput lightweight concurrency on the Java platform. For Java 21, Project Loom has reinstated the thread as an efficient unit of concurrency by adding a lightweight implementation of threads, called Virtual Threads, to the Java platform. Also in Java 21, Project Loom has introduced a preview API for Structured Concurrency, an approach to concurrent programming that preserves the natural relationship between tasks and subtasks, and leads to more readable, maintainable, and reliable concurrent code. This talk will present how Java has abstracted its existing thread construct to provide an alternative user-mode implementation of threads and also introduce the API for structured concurrency to treat multiple tasks running in different threads as a single unit of work. ALAN BATEMAN Alan Bateman is an engineer in the Java Platform Group at Oracle. Alan has worked on many areas of the JDK including Virtual Threads, the Java Module System, the modularization of the JDK itself, and the core libraries and APIs. He previously worked on many of the tool and profiling APis including the JSR-163 implementation and other serviceability features. Alan is currently focused on "Project Loom", the project setup in OpenJDK to explore, and developer Java VM features and APIs for the purpose of supporting easy-to-use, high-throughput lightweight concurrency and new programming models on the Java platform.