Java 21 Is a Major Step for Java

Even though good,old Java threads and virtual threads share the name…​Threads, the comparisons/online discussions feel a bit apple-to-oranges to me. Scope-local variables may prove to be a better alternative to thread locals for some use cases. The primary goal of Project Loom is to make concurrency more accessible, efficient, and developer-friendly.

A better way to control latency, and at a more appropriate granularity, is deadlines. An alternative solution to that of fibers to concurrency’s simplicity vs. performance issue is known as async/await, and has been adopted by C# and Node.js, and will likely be adopted by standard JavaScript. A point to be noted is this suspension or resuming occurs in the application runtime instead of the OS. As a result, it prevents the expensive context switch between kernel threads. It works on the work-stealing algorithm so that every thread maintains a Double Ended Queue (deque) of tasks. It executes the task from its head, and any idle thread does not block while waiting for the task.

Project Loom and Existing Libraries/Frameworks

However, because virtual threads can be very numerous, use thread locals after careful consideration. In particular, do not use thread locals to pool costly resources among multiple tasks sharing the same thread in a thread pool. Virtual threads should never be pooled, since each is intended to run only a single task over its lifetime. We have removed many uses of thread locals from the java.base module in preparation for virtual threads, to reduce memory footprint when running with millions of threads. The amount of heap space and garbage collector activity that virtual threads require is difficult, in general, to compare to that of asynchronous code. A million virtual threads require at least a million objects, but so do a million tasks sharing a pool of platform threads.

As we want fibers to be serializable, continuations should be serializable as well. If they are serializable, we might as well make them cloneable, as the ability to clone continuations actually adds expressivity (as it allows going back to a previous suspension point). It is, however, a very serious challenge to make continuation cloning useful enough for such uses, as Java code stores a lot of information off-stack, and to be useful, cloning would need to be “deep” in some customizable way. Continuations are a very low-level primitive that will only be used by library authors to build higher-level constructs (just as java.util.Stream implementations leverage Spliterator).

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Unfortunately, the number of available threads is limited because the JDK implements threads as wrappers around operating system (OS) threads. OS threads are costly, so we cannot have too many of them, which makes the implementation ill-suited to the thread-per-request style. If each request consumes a thread, and thus an OS thread, for its duration, then the number of threads often becomes the limiting factor long before other resources, such as CPU or network connections, are exhausted. The JDK’s current implementation of threads caps the application’s throughput to a level well below what the hardware can support.

Developers will typically migrate application code to the virtual-thread-per-task ExecutorService from a traditional ExecutorService based on thread pools. Thread pools, like all resource pools, are intended to share expensive resources, but virtual threads are not expensive and there is never a need to pool them. Executor.newVirtualThreadPerTaskExecutor() is not the only way to create virtual threads. The new java.lang.Thread.Builder API, discussed below, can create and start virtual threads.

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As background, the byte-oriented input/output streams are not specified to be thread-safe and do not specify the expected behavior when close() is invoked while a thread is blocked in a read or write method. In most scenarios it does not make sense to use a particular input or output stream from multiple concurrent threads. The character-oriented reader/writers are also not specified to be thread-safe, but they do expose a lock object for sub-classes. Aside from pinning, the synchronization in these classes is problematic and inconsistent; e.g., the stream decoders and encoders used by InputStreamReader and OutputStreamWriter synchronize on the stream object rather than the lock object. The implementations of these APIs are heavily synchronized and require changes to avoid pinning when they are used in virtual threads.

OS-level monitoring will observe that a JDK process uses fewer OS threads than there are virtual threads. Project Loom’s compatibility with existing Java ecosystem components is a significant advantage. It allows you to gradually adopt fibers where they provide the most value in your application while preserving your investment in existing code and libraries.

Java 20 — Doubling down on the Loom Project

However, we still need to wait for Library/Framework implementers like Apache Tomcat and Spring to move everything to Virtual Threads from native Threads. Once the frameworks complete the transition, all Java microservices/monoliths that use these upgraded frameworks will become non-blocking automatically. Before proceeding, it is very important to understand the difference between parallelism and concurrency. Concurrency is the process of scheduling multiple largely independent tasks on a smaller or limited number of resources.

We also explored the tasks and schedulers in threads and how Fibers Class and pluggable user-mode schedulers can be an excellent alternative for traditional threads in Java. It proposes that developers could be allowed to use virtual threads using traditional blocking I/O. If a virtual thread is blocked due to a delay by an I/O task, it still won’t block the thread as loom java the virtual threads can be managed by the application instead of the operating system. On the contrary, Virtual threads, also known as user threads or green threads are scheduled by the applications instead of the operating system. JVM, being the application, gets the total control over all the virtual threads and the whole scheduling process when working with Java.

Issues

So, we have had to deal with callbacks, and do things like Promises.all() or CompletableFuture.thenCompose() to join several async operations and process the results. As the suspension of a continuation would also require it to be stored in a call stack so it can be resumed in the same order, it becomes a costly process. https://www.globalcloudteam.com/ To cater to that, the project Loom also aims to add lightweight stack retrieval while resuming the continuation. While this topic, like all else in the multithreaded realm is complex and requires quite some time to master, the code snippet down below should be a good example of the structured concurrency in action.

• Threads are lightweight sub-processes within a Java application that can be executed independently.
• These two were marginally changed from their first appearance in Java 19 few months back, hence the content below is mostly the same as my last years Java 19 overview.
• Every continuation has an entry point and a yield (suspending point) point.
• Enter Project Loom, a paradigm-shifting initiative designed to transform the way Java handles concurrency.
• Loom and Java in general are prominently devoted to building web applications.
• Sharing data across the actors in the connected workflow is traditionally done via passing it as method arguments, but one way to not clutter your code with plethora of method parameters is to use Thread Local variables for data scoped within a running thread.

These operations will cause the virtual thread to mount and unmount multiple times, typically once for each call to get() and possibly multiple times in the course of performing I/O in send(…). On the other hand, virtual threads introduce some challenges for observability. In addition, blocking in native code or attempting to obtain an unavailable monitor when entering synchronized or calling Object.wait, will also block the native carrier thread.

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In short, because a fiber is a thread, it will have a very similar API to that of heavyweight threads, represented by the Thread class. With respect to the Java memory model, fibers will behave exactly like the current implementation of Thread. While fibers will be implemented using JVM-managed continuations, we may also want to make them compatible with OS continuations, like Google’s user-scheduled kernel threads. It is also possible to split the implementation of these two building-blocks of threads between the runtime and the OS. For example, modifications to the Linux kernel done at Google (video, slides), allow user-mode code to take over scheduling kernel threads, thus essentially relying on the OS just for the implementation of continuations, while having libraries handle the scheduling.