The State of Project Loom with Ron Pressler

Conversation with Project Loom lead Ron Pressler about the project’s core mission, challenges like interaction with debuggers and garbage collectors, the timeline for the next steps, compatibility and more. Table of Contents: 0:00 Intro 1:05 Threading in Java today 8:35 Threading with Project Loom 11:57 Java Platform is more than just the JVM 13:20 Virtual threads 16:08 The challenge of debuggers 22:35 Loom is in final descent 24:35 The challenge of garbage collectors 29:10 Backward and forward compatibility 31:38 Virtual thread API and updating code 38:01 Why platform threads can’t block 41:18 How to join results across threads 44:30 Outro Loom: Project Loom intends to explore, incubate, and deliver JVM features and APIs built on top of them that support easy-to-use high-throughput lightweight concurrency and new programming models on the Java platform. It accomplishes that by adding delimited continuations and virtual threads. More on