This week I took the stage at bol.com with a presentation titled The State of Lightweight Threads for the JVM. The abstract of the presentation was as follows:
Thanks to your constantly crashing desktop apps, you know about processes. Microservice flavored web development taught us about threads too. Then came callbacks, shortening lifetime of millions of developers. Do you recall the day you shed tears when Java shipped a Future that you can complete? I know you haven’t forgotten how Reactive Streams occupied our agendas with RxJava,Reactor, and infinite stack traces. Now newspapers are yelling about coroutines, fibers, lightweight threads! We poor souls… In this presentation, I aimto give a 2,000ft overview of where do we come from, where are we heading to, and what does all this mean for the Java Virtual Machine, aka, JVM. Are you a Java developer? Thread circus owner? Reactive ninja? Kotlin fan? COBOL enthusiast? Algol pensioner? There is something I will tell you. (Spoiler: I will as well talk about Project Loom, structured concurrency, and scoped variables.)