Valhalla

Recently, somewhere on social media, I saw a code snippet. I guess the intention was to show how “Java is bad and dead”. I think it’s a good time to focus on some claims, falsehoods and half-truths that appeared in the comments, which I found pretty amusing. It also answers some of the criticisms raised in conference talks in autumn (checks the calendar) of 2026!

TL;DR: compact source files are already here, value objects from Valhalla are coming, you can keep your head in 2005, but be aware what year it is now.

Many features and changes we see coming live in new Java version (if not most of them) are developed under so-called umbrella projects. We frequently see syntax improvements from project Amber, project Jigsaw is about bringing modules, project Loom (surprise, surprise) is about new threads, project Panama roughly speaking is about using native stuff safely and efficiently, and among the most known ones, project Valhalla starts to become a thing, thanks to JEP-390 being included in Java 16.