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Comment by valenterry | Hacker News Reader

This has nothing to do with the JVM. Scala for example is already capable of exactly what Erlang/Haskell do. This is merely about the language Java, which lacks support for to make such a programming style ergonomic. You either need a language with very powerful type-system or a dynamically typed language. (or specific support for it, like in Go, but even in Go you are limited to what the language designers forsaw)

Project Loom will not change that, but it will improve performance for certain scenarios.

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Project Loom is both about the JVM and the language Java. Most of the work for Loom AFAICT is at the JVM level, and the benefits are that all Java code will Just Work(TM) with the new primitives underneath them at the end.

Scala’s varied async/concurrency libraries are implemented in user land, and still use threads underneath. Mechanically, you must opt in to these and have to work to interop with code that might use other primitives. Scala can handle a lot of this complexity at compile time w/ types, but it’s not perfect, and certain runtime behaviors will always be out of scope.

Loom improves this by allowing any language that runs on the JVM (Java, Scala, Clojure) to opaquely use virtual threads to run their existing synchronous, scheduler-unaware code on the new Loom concurrency primitives implemented in the JVM. That’s powerful!

Everything you say is correct, but it can create a misunderstanding, so I want to elaborate for other readers:

Concurrency is not mainly about threads or performance, it is about program behavior semantics. Loom does not do anything about that, it "merely" improves performance. Well, you could say it actually makes semantics worse (you used (TM) for good reasons).

In that sense, I believe that Scala or any language with good concurrency semantics will benefit from Loom more than Java, unfortunately. But Java can of course still catch up on a language level. Even after such a long time, there are still new and interesting libraries (e.g. looking at JOOQ).

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