From Java 17 to 21 and beyond: Loom, Amber and Valhalla

Track: Java Platform

Abstract

The two years realese cadence of LTS versions gives the entire Java ecosystem the opportunity to accelerate. It also brings the new features Java has to offer faster, so that developers can improve applications readability, maintainability as well as development productivity. This presentation covers three of the new features of the JDK: Amber, Loom and Valhalla. Amber is about bringing pattern matching to the Java language. It's currently added bit by bit: records, pattern matching for instanceof, for switch, and record pattern matching. Loom offers a new concurrent programming model. With Loom, you can write your code in a synchronous way, without any callback, and execute it asynchronously, with all the performances benefits you may expect. It is a preview feature of the JDK 19. Valhalla brings a new kind of objects to the language, so that you do not have to choose between performances and abstraction. Valhalla will add user defined primitive types to the Java language as well value types.

José Paumard

Passionate about programming computers for over 25 years, Jose made his debut in assembler and C, C for SIMD parallel machines before adopting Java as an object-oriented language. PhD in applied maths and computer science, assistant professor at the University Sorbonne Paris Nord for 25 years, Java Champion, JavaOne Rockstar, Jose also has a passion for education. He gives talks in major international Java conferences (JavaOne, Oracle CodeOne, Devoxx in Antwerp, Paris and London, DevNexus, GoTo). He wrote numerous technical articles on Java technologies for Java Magazine, Oracle Technolgy Network among other publication. He writes a blog, Java le soir, French documentary source on Java technologies for thousands of french speaking developers around the world. He is a member of the french Paris Java User Group, has been a co-organizer of the conference Devoxx France for three years, and disorganizer of JChateau, an unconference held in the Chateau of the Loire Valley. He maintains a french YouTube channel with more than 80 hours of Java courses. He is also a Pluralsight author in the Java space.