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A comment on Project Loom: Fibers and Continuations for the Java Virtual Machine.

Re:Project Loom: Fibers and Continuations for the Java Virtu... by ssijak on Wednesday November 01, 2017 @10:38AM (#15601497)
There are already many different libraries or approaches to concurrency and parallelism on JVM.

- http://www.baeldung.com/java-completablefuture Promises

- http://vertx.io/ Event Loop

- https://akka.io/ and http://www.paralleluniverse.co/quasar/ Actors

- https://projectreactor.io/ and https://github.com/ReactiveX/RxJava Reactive, event-based

- https://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/coroutines.html Kotlin coroutines. Something like Project Loom from what I gathered from the article. Can be easily used as lightweight threads, async/await, actors, etc.

- Clojure with its own mix https://purelyfunctional.tv/guide/clojure-concurrency-the-ul...

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Re:Project Loom: Fibers and Continuations for the Java Virtu... by tomp on Wednesday November 01, 2017 @10:46AM (#15601584)
Actually, Quasar is more than actors - it also implements true, actual fibers/coroutines, using bytecode rewriting (essentially turning each async function into a state machine).
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Re:Project Loom: Fibers and Continuations for the Java Virtu... by relics443 on Wednesday November 01, 2017 @10:58AM (#15601692)
My understanding of all these projects is that you have to change your style of coding / have more complex APIs, or they're just syntactic sugar over heavyweight threads.

What loom seems to offer is the best of both worlds; going back to writing simpler code (e.g. regular "blocking" io code) while scaling much better.

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Re:Project Loom: Fibers and Continuations for the Java Virtu... by _Codemonkeyism on Wednesday November 01, 2017 @03:49PM (#15604842)
"blocking" io code would be blocking.

Every IO library would need to migrate to something non blocking. This might happen with some - currently some use Netty and NIO - but e.g. JDBC drivers are synchronous.

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Re:Project Loom: Fibers and Continuations for the Java Virtu... by relics443 on Thursday November 02, 2017 @01:26AM (#15608051)
I believe the article mentions making the java.io package aware of fibers.
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Re:Project Loom: Fibers and Continuations for the Java Virtu... by _Codemonkeyism on Thursday November 02, 2017 @05:34AM (#15608949)
Yes you're right, though it would be a miracle - I hope for it ! - if this can be done without changes to existing code.
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Re:Project Loom: Fibers and Continuations for the Java Virtu... by SureshG on Tuesday November 07, 2017 @04:29PM (#15647834)
> have more complex APIs, or they're just syntactic sugar over heavyweight threads.

I am pretty sure that's not the case with Kotlin coroutines :)

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