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Comment by initplus | Hacker News Reader

The benefits from virtual threads come from the simple API that it presents to the programmer. It's not a performance optimization.

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But that same benefit was always available with platform threads -- a simple API. What is the real gain by using virtual threads? It's either going to be performance or memory utilization.

It's combining the benefits from async models (state machines separated from os threads, thus more optimal for I/O bound workload), with the benefits from proper threading models (namely the simpler human interface).

Memory utilization & performance is going to be similar to the async callback mess.

Why is an async model better than using OS threads for an I/O bound workload? The OS is doing async stuff internally and shielding the complexity with threads. With virtual threads this work has shifted to the JVM. Can the JVM do threads better than the OS?

it can do a much better job because there isn't a security boundary. OS thread scheduling requires sys calls and invalidate a bunch of cache to prevent timing leaks

> Can the JVM do threads better than the OS?

Yes. The JVM has far more opportunities for optimizing threads because it doesn't need to uphold 50 years of accumulated invariants and compatibility that current OSes do, and JVM has more visibilty on the application internals.

"Why is an async model better than using OS threads for an I/O bound workload?"

Because evented/callback-driven code is a nightmare to reason about and breaks lots of very basic tools, like the humble stack trace.

Another big thing for me is resource management - try/finally don't work across callback boundaries, but do work within a virtual thread. I recently ported a netty-based evented system to virtual threads and a very long-standing issue - resource leakage - turned into one very nice try/finally block.

Throughput. The code can be "suspended" on a blocking call (I/O, where the platform thread usually is wasted, as the CPU has nothing to do during this time). So, the platform thread can do other work in the meantime.

Create 100k platform threads and you'll find out.

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