It has been a fairly busy week in the core OpenJDK community, including new developments related to Projects Valhalla, Lilliput, and Loom.
The big news is that John Rose has published a paper entitled "Design for the Parametric JVM" - this work is very early stage and still very theoretical. The overall goal of the design is to support generic programming, using Java’s current generics constructs but adding in inline types from Project Valhalla. The end result is intended to be the Java answer to the questions of "reified generics" and "type erasure".
InfoQ will cover this work in detail when it is closer to the domain of the practitioner, but this is potentially the most significant JVM-level work since the addition of the invokedynamic bytecode.
Roman Kennke announced the kick-off of a new proposed project, Project Lilliput. This project intends to reduce the size of the JVMs object header down to 64 bits. The project could significantly improve heap memory usage including higher allocation rates and reduced GC pressure.
There were also new early access binaries from Project Loom, although there continues to be no indication of when Loom might appear as a preview version on the mainline builds.
Elsewhere in the wider community, Hibernate Reactive reached their 1.0 milestone for non-blocking database clients and with support for reactive programming.
The Jetty Project released the new Jetty Load Generator - this Java 11+ load-testing library can test any HTTP server and supports both HTTP/1.1 and the newer HTTP/2.
The GlassFish Project released a milestone build - 6.1-M1 of their Jakarta EE server. This release implements Jakarta EE 9.1 - which is the Jakarta EE 9 standard, but rebaselined on Java 11. The GA release is still on track and expected to be released on 2021-04-13.
Google announced the release of support for JVM applications in their open-source fuzzing testing framework, OSS-Fuzz.
Finally, Jason Warner, CTO @ GitHub posted a somewhat lighthearted poll that saw Java voted the language and ecosystem that developers would be happiest being stuck with for the rest of their careers.