Java has come a long way in the field of concurrency, whether it’s our departure station ‘classic threads’, or the stops ‘Runnables’, ‘ExecutorServices’, ‘CompletableFutures’, and ‘ForkJoinPools’. Now that Java 21 is out, we have arrived at the ‘virtual threads’ station.

With the availability of virtual threads, our Java programs theoretically have access to millions of threads. This increase in the number of threads directly makes coordinating, observing, and isolating threads somewhat more difficult. There are currently two new Java features in development that can help with this: ‘structured concurrency’ and ‘scoped values’.

In this presentation, I will introduce and demonstrate these new features, and show how they can help address the challenges that have arisen since the introduction of virtual threads. I will also show how the availability of these features can impact your daily work as a Java developer, and what the rest of Java’s concurrency journey currently looks like.

Target audience: Java developers