Java's Future-Looking Projects: Panama, Loom, Amber, and Valhalla

The press release "Oracle Code One Java Keynote Outlines the Future of Java" describes the Java Keynote at Oracle Code "highlight[ing] future projects:" Project Valhalla, Project Panama, Project Amber, and Project Loom. This post provides brief summaries of each of these projects and some recent work associated with each of these projects for those who may not be familiar.

Project Panama

Project Panama is about "Interconnecting JVM and native code." Its introduction states, "We are improving and enriching the connections between the Java TM virtual machine and well-defined but 'foreign' (non-Java) APIs, including many interfaces commonly used by C programmers."

Build 0 (2018/10/24) of the Project Panama Early-Access Builds was released recently. As with other OpenJDK-related early access builds, this build is "intended for expert users" and "is provided as a convenience so that they don't need to build from the source code." One of its most significant issues to be aware of is, "Windows support not available."

Project Loom

The Project Loom page describes Loom: "The goal of this Project is to explore and incubate Java VM features and APIs built on top of them for the implementation of lightweight user-mode threads (fibers), delimited continuations (of some form), and related features, such as explicit tail-call."

The Project Loom proposal (titled "Project Loom: Fibers and Continuations for the Java Virtual Machine") begins, "Project Loom's mission is to make it easier to write, debug, profile, and maintain concurrent applications meeting today's requirements."

The message "Kick-off meeting for Project Loom" on the OpenJDK loom-dev mailing list states that "Project Loom has been up and running here for a number of months doing some early exploration and prototyping of both delimited continuations and fibers." That message talks about expanding that effort with a kick-off meeting and provides links to the aforementioned Project Loom Proposal and to the YouTube-hosted presentation "Project Loom with Ron Pressler and Alan Bateman."

Project Amber

The Project Amber page describes its goal to "explore and incubate smaller, productivity-oriented Java language features that have been accepted as candidate JEPs under the OpenJDK JEP process." There are some exciting features being explored via this project including Pattern Matching (JEP 305), Switch Expressions (JEP 325), Raw String Literals (JEP 326), Concise Method Bodies (draft JEP), and faster String.format and Objects.hash methods [JDK-8205637 ("Optimized invocation of String::format and Objects::hash")].

The list of JEPs just mentioned are evidence of the significant work underway on Amber.

Project Valhalla

All of these projects propose exciting additions to Java, but the one I'm most excited about is Project Valhalla and its Value Objects/Types (JEP 169). The Project Valhalla page describes this project's goal "to provide a venue to explore and incubate advanced Java VM and Language feature candidates."

Project Valhalla has seen significant developments in recent weeks, especially since the Valhalla Executive Group Meeting on October 10, 2018. In the OpenJDK valhalla-spec-experts mailing list message, "Entering the next phase of Project Valhalla," Brian Goetz writes that this meeting was a "super-productive meeting with broad attendance" that helped Valhalla developers "to thrash out where we are and where we're going next." Goetz also states that "this marks the beginning of Phase III of the project" and outlines what constituted Phase 1 and Phase 2. This same packed message also summarizes the next steps for Valhalla:

Looking ahead, our next target is L2 -- which will capture the choices we've made so far, provide a useful test bed for doing library experiments, and set the stage for drilling into the remaining open questions between here and L10. L10 is our target for a first preview, which should support value types and erased generics over values.

Another recent, interesting Goetz message on the valhalla-spec experts mailing list is "Values and erased generics," in which Goetz provides "a summary of the story we came up with for erased generics over values" that "builds on the typing story outlined in John's 'Q-Types in L-World' write-up." The title of that referenced John Rose writeup is currently, "Q-Types in L-World 10: Valhalla Working Group, Burlington, September 2018." A revision of proposed JVM specification changes for LW2 was announced earlier this month, as well.

The amount of work being done related to Project Valhalla is made clear in the number of messages on the mailing list about this project. These include those previously mentioned as well as others such as "var, static factory method, and value type constructor;" "Value types, encapsulation, and uninitialized values;" and "Array covariance."

There is also a series of Goetz messages focusing on specific lessons learned from the first two phases:

• "[LW100] Specialized generics -- translation and binary compatibility issues"
  • "Challenges of evolving a class to be any-generic, while interacting with existing erased code."
• "[LW100] Specialized generics -- migration"
  • "Stories we cooked up for migration."
• "[LW100] Specialized generics -- user model issues"
  • "User model and source compatibility of migrating existing libraries"
• "[LW10] Value equality"
  • "If we expect values to 'work like an int', then |==| comparisons on value types should work like they do on primitives..."

The OpenJDK valhalla-dev mailing list message "Valhalla project repository status: Branched off 'LW1' in preparation for 'LW2'" announces the creation of the "lw1" branch.

Conclusion

It's not surprising that these four projects were mentioned at Oracle Code One's Java Keynote. They cover many of the features to look forward to in Java's future.