The new thing structured concurrency brings — in addition to making some best practices easier to follow — is that the runtime now records parent-child relationships among threads . You can see these relationships and the tree hierarchy for the entire application with a new JSON thread-dump. I tried moving plain old Tomcat based service to scalable netty based reactive stack but it turned out to be too much work and an alien programing model. With Loom/Virtual thread, the only thing I will be looking for server supporting Virtual threads natively. Helidon Nima would fit the bill here as all other frameworks/app servers have so far just slapping virtual threads on their thread pool based system. And unsurprisingly it is not leading to great perf expected from Virtual thread based system.

Most Java projects using thread pools and platform threads will benefit from switching to virtual threads. Candidates include Java server software like Tomcat, Undertow, and Netty; and web frameworks like Spring and Micronaut. https://globalcloudteam.com/ I expect most Java web technologies to migrate to virtual threads from thread pools. Java web technologies and trendy reactive programming libraries like RxJava and Akka could also use structured concurrency effectively.

How Do You Design a Scalable Application for Dynamic Markets?

Typically, while experimenting with virtual-threads, we realized that using the postgresql-JDBC driverresults in frequent pinning. Oracle delivers new Java Feature releases every six months via a predictable release schedule. You can see how the example above uses a cached thread pool to submit 10,000 tasks which simulate a small IO operation that takes 10ms plus the time taken to print to the console and incrementing a counter. As we mentioned earlier, context switching is very expensive in Java due to having to save and load thread stacks every time it happens. In the last decade, we have tried to addressed this problem with the use of asynchronous processing libraries and the use of futures. For example, using CompletableFuture we can achieve a non-blocking approach, although the readability of these models is, in many cases, not what we would expect.

• Additionally, since Opencart was quite slow and easily saturated, let’s try this time with nginx default index site which should get us a really fast response time.
• A JDK Flight Recorder event is emitted when a thread blocks while pinned .
• We had to change low-level I/O in the JDK because it drops down to native.
• The new java.lang.Thread.Builder API, discussed below, can create and start virtual threads.
• Honestly I’m not sure what you’re upset about, I am a bit surprised at the vehemence of your response to that element of my comment.

We have to renounce to certain sequential workflow structures like loops, this means that a piece of code that has been written as sequential cannot be transformed to asynchronous easily. OpenJDK draft proposal would make concurrent programming far easier, while making more efficient use of hardware resources. In addition, the database drivers and drivers for other external services must also support the reactive model.

Preparing for Java Virtual Threads

I said in a sibling comment that scheduler activations may have been a flawed idea, but I don’t think the space of user-space scheduling APIs is fully explored. If io-uring is proof of anything, it’s that there’s still fundamental changes we can make in how we schedule work with the kernel. Maybe ironically given all the green thread experiments in industry, but Microsoft just removed their user-mode scheduling library in Windows 11. The problem solved by SA is equivalently solved by a scalable multiplex IO syscall like kevent and userland scheduling. There’s no particular need for the upcall if blocking information is available another way. I saw that’s how wasmtime solves pre-emption of wasm threads with their “epoch-based interruption”.

They achieve this by effectively multiplexing the use of O/S threads. As already stated above, pooling threads is no longer necessary when using virtual threads (as well as being something you want to avoid to improve throughput when performing blocking I/O). As a result, with the introduction of virtual threads, the Loom team advocates removing the use of ExecutorService for this use-case and changing your code to use a Semaphore instead, e.g. With the recap out of the way, let’s get back to covering the cases where we may need to change existing code to take full advantage of the promise of virtual threads, covering both the why and the how. It was recently announced that virtual threads, a new JDK feature developed by the OpenJDK project Loom, will be available as a preview feature in the forthcoming Java 19 release. You don’t choose Java because you want the latest syntactical sugar or whatever cool features fit your idiosyncratic views on software development.

What does this mean to regular Java developers?

This is the fourth incubation of the Vector API. It introduces a set of methods for data-parallel operations on sized vector types. Changes for this version include an API to load and store vectors to and from MemorySegments as defined by JEP 424. It also adds two new cross-lane vector operations, compress and its inverse expand, together with a complementary vector mask compress operation. And finally, it expands the supported set of bitwise integral lanewise operations. For a more in-depth look at this API, I refer you to this and this article.

The new final method Thread.threadId() returns a thread’s identifier. The existing non-final method Thread.getId() is now deprecated. When it comes to Java, JRebel is the tool that can help to maximize your productivity. JRebel integrates with the latest Java tools, including Java 19. Try it free to see how much time your team can save on development. Staying on the topic of Pattern Matching, this release also includes changes related to the Record Patterns.

Structured assignment of tasks

For actively developed code, upgrading with every feature release is overall easier, cheaper and safer than staying on an old version, skipping updates, and doing a big transition every few years. But Java has always had semi-annual feature releases, and there wasn’t even LTS — people had to upgrade to a new feature release ever six months. It’s just that we dropped major releases altogether and then gave the feature releases new version numbers, and that confused many people . But, I will be pushing for the adoption of virtual threads once they become more useful for the community . So, whatever the realities JEP425 operates within, I do hope these improvements land by Java 21, so that my job is made easier.

Erlang is an opinionated specialization of concurrent programming en large, which may be a better for for certain problems, but not for others. Java Reactive works around the shortcomings of the platform by basically inventing its own language inside Java. The extent of the OS relevancy is inversely proportionaly to the richness of the language runtime and ecosystem.

Using virtual threads vs. platform threads

It would be fair to compare a preview with a late-stage beta test. Features that enter into a preview stage are often targets of user feedback that Oracle uses to make fixes or changes as the case demands or to eventually release it. It was originally released in 1995 and has since undergone several updates. The Java programming language is a high-level, object-oriented language that is known for its portability and platform independence. We can achieve the same functionality with structured concurrency using the code below. Below is the FortuneRepository except the blocking we’ve seen earlier has been replaced by reactive methods.

It is right in the middle between LTS releases, which means we can already trace the trends of Java evolution,” said Dmitry Chuyko, Performance Architect at BellSoft, in a blog post. BellSoft is a key OpenJDK contributor and provider of the Liberica JDK. To maintain the rate of improvement to Java, five years ago Oracle instituted a six-month cadence for releases of the platform. Java 19 marks the tenth such release, which provides a steady stream of innovations. In comparison to reactive programming this approach is much easier to read and debug.

Because execution doesn’t pause, you can even do it in production (if you’re careful…). So while it’s not a traditional debugger, in the “pause execution here” sense, it’s still a way to inspect the system that fits well into an actor model. If such a thing doesn’t exist in java already, I’m sure it will soon. Improves developer productivity by extending pattern matching to express more sophisticated, composable data queries. This is done by enhancing the Java programming language with record patterns to deconstruct record values. Record patterns and type patterns can be nested to enable a powerful, declarative, and composable form of data navigation and processing.

According to an IDC report more than 10 million developers – representing 75% of full-time developers worldwide – use Java. I think that providing a non reactive API for a WebClient to allow use it with VT could be a way; and another approach could be that the reactive approach had replaced its execution model by under-the-hood virtual threads. The two innovations in Project Amber relate to pattern matching.

About Oracle

You can check how to enable preview features in Java in our article “How to enable previews in Java”. Virtual threads are instances of java.lang.Thread implemented by the JDK in such a matter that allows for many active instances to coexist in the same process. The semantics of virtual threads are identical to platform threads, except that they belong to a single ThreadGroup and cannot be enumerated.

The proposal, authored by Ron Pressler and Alan Bateman, both consulting members of the Oracle technical staff, does not specify a release of standard Java that would feature virtual threads. In the second variant, Thread.ofVirtual() returns a VirtualThreadBuilder whose start() method starts a virtual thread. The alternative method Thread.ofPlatform() returns java enhancement proposals pursue virtual threads a PlatformThreadBuilder via which we can start a platform thread. This allows us to process a large number of requests in parallel with a small pool of carrier threads. The “Detailed changes” section describes in detail all of the changes that have been made to the JDK to support virtual threads, including the aforementioned APIs for using virtual threads.

If you’re using it to protect in-memory data structures then it’s not a big deal. Does you library use any of the JDK’s blocking APIs like Thread.sleep, Socket or FileInputStream directly or transitively? The only thing you should check is if you’re using monitors for synchronization which are currently causing the carrier thread to get pinned. Blocking endpoints are mostly irrelevent because it alters the temporal flow of things, which makes your code executed in debug mode not 100% « isomorphic » with your code executed in run mode.

Project Loom Preview/Incubator Features

The implementations of these APIs are heavily synchronized and require changes to avoid pinning when they are used in virtual threads. The Thread.setPriority method has no effect on virtual threads. The constructors defined by the Thread class create platform threads, as before. Unlike platform thread stacks, virtual thread stacks are not GC roots, so the references contained in them are not traversed in a stop-the-world pause by garbage collectors, such as G1, that perform concurrent heap scanning. Of course, the virtual thread will not be garbage collected if it is running or if it is blocked and could ever be unblocked.