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Comment by kjto | Hacker News Reader

> Virtual threads offer a more efficient alternative to platform threads, allowing developers to handle a large number of tasks with significantly lower overhead.

they should have just called them "Tasks" leaving the already overloaded term "virtual" out of the conversation.

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We went through a lot of iterations on what they should be called. They were originally called Fibers, but since they were extremely thread like it was decided they should be actual threads, so they should be some type of thread. Once that decision was made the question then becomes which adjective to add to Thread, and things like LightWeight, Small, etc. were ruled out as smaller or more lightweight threads might be introduced in the future.

Thanks for the explanation. That makes a lot of sense.

Naming things well is harder than making said things sometimes.

Naming things is one of the two hard problems in computer science along with cache invalidation and off-by-one errors.

IMHO virtual is the perfect word. The JVM's entire schtick is abstracting (virtual) hardware (machine). A simple API pertaining to intent, that can be materialized depending on OS and hardware.

Calls are virtual, though under the hood the compiler may inline them.

Memory is managed, though through analysis some allocations will go on the stack.

Threads are now (no full grandfathering, but they tried) virtual, and the runtime may now optimize them differently on different OSes and hardware.

Java's already got tasks[1] within the namespace of parallelism though, but it hasn't overloaded any meaning onto virtual.

[1] https://docs.oracle.com/javase/9/docs/api/index.html?javafx/...

JavaFX is not really a part of Java and isn’t actually shipped with most builds of OpenJdk. Azul Zulu is the only build that I know of that you can get FX built in.

"Fun" fact, there might just come official JDKs that do include javafx.

Is Oracle planning on reinvesting in it? It’s just never appealed to me.

They are of type `Thread`, for interoperability with existing code.

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