loom VS JDK

It's more accurate to say Loom is [a particular type of] continuations in the JVM, which can be used to implement green threads / fibers.

You can see the implementation of VirtualThread here: https://github.com/openjdk/loom/blob/fibers/src/java.base/sh...

This uses the internal 'one-shot delimited continuation': https://github.com/openjdk/loom/blob/fibers/src/java.base/sh...

So, at least in principle, there is scope for other styles of concurrency to be implemented over this.

Loom is actively developed https://github.com/openjdk/loom

Currently the Thread public constructor defaults to platform threads to be fully backwards compatible. So all libraries must be updated to support the new model.

I've been casually following the repo ( https://github.com/openjdk/loom ) and the mailing list ( https://mail.openjdk.java.net/mailman/listinfo/loom-dev ) over the last 18 months or so, and it definitely appears that things are ramping up as of late. The implication (as I see it) is that they are relatively happy with the general design are and are at the point where they want help from experts in the various areas of the JDK (GC, Debugging, etc) to make sure that their pieces play well with Loom.

https://github.com/openjdk/loom/blob/fibers/src/java.base/share/classes/sun/nio/ch/NioSocketImpl.java#L177

[1] https://github.com/openjdk/loom/blob/fibers/src/java.base/share/classes/java/lang/VirtualThread.java#L933

Completely gutted from the OpenJDK, last I checked. See here for the culprit PR: https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/pull/18688

> Yes, they're changing one aspect of signal handler use to work around this problem. They're not stopping the use of signal handlers in general. Hotspot continues to use signals for efficiency in general. See https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/blob/9059727df135dc90311bd476...

This whole thread is about SIGSEGV, and specifically their SIGSEGV handling. However, catching normal signals is not about efficiency.

Some of their exception handling is still odd: There is no reason for a program that receives SIGILL to ever attempt continuing. But others is fine, like catching SIGFPE to just forward an exception to the calling code.

(Sure, you could construct an argument to say that this is for efficiency if you considered the alternative to be implementing floating point in software so that all exceptions exist in user-space, but hardware floating point is the norm and such alternative would be wholly unreasonable.)

> The wonderful thing about choosing not to care about facts is having whatever opinions you want.

I appreciate the irony of you making such statement, proudly thinking that your opinion equals fact, and therefore any other opinion is not.

This discussion is nothing but subjective opinion vs. subjective opinion. Facts are (hopefully, as I can only speak for myself) inputs to both our opinions, but no opinion about "good" or "bad", "nasty" or not can ever be objective. Objective code quality does not exist.

I remember talking to Brendan about the PreserveFramePointer patch during my first months at Netflix in 2015. As of JDK 21, unfortunately it is no longer a general purpose solution for the JVM, because it prevents a fast path being taken for stack thawing for virtual threads: https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/blob/d32ce65781c1d7815a69ceac...

Map doesn't implement the Collection interface.

https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/blob/master/src/java.base/sha...

C++ lets you write anything you can imagine, and the language features and standard library often facilitate that. The committee espouses the view that they want to provide many "zero [runtime] cost," abstractions. Anybody can contribute to the language, although the committee process is often slow and can be political, each release the surface area and capability of the language gets larger.

I believe Hazard Pointers are slated for C++26, and these will add a form "free later, but not quite garbage collection" to the language. There was a talk this year about using hazard pointers to implement a much faster std::shared_ptr.

It's a language with incredible depth because so many different paradigms have been implemented in it, but also has many pitfalls for new and old users because there are many different ways of solving the same problem.

I feel that in C++, more than any other language, you need to know the actual implementation under the hood to use it effectively. This means knowing not just what the language specifies, but can occaissionally require knowing what GCC or Clang generate on your particular hardware.

Many garbage collected languages are written in or have parts of their implementations in C++. See JS (https://github.com/v8/v8)and Java GC (https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/tree/36de19d4622e38b6c00644b0...)

I am not an expert on Java (or C++), so if someone knows better or can add more please correct me.