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 that: https://openjdk.java.net/projects/loom

Ron:

Developer in the…