Announced in 2014, Project Valhalla is an experimental OpenJDK project to bring major new language features to Java 10 and beyond. It primarily focuses on enabling developers to create and utilize value types, or non-reference values. Last week, the project’s head Brian Goetz shared the goal, motivation, current status, and other details about the project in a set of documents called “State of Valhalla”.
Goetz shared that in the span of five years, the team has come up with five distinct prototypes of the project. Sharing the current state of the project, he wrote, “We believe we are now at the point where we have a clear and coherent path to enhance the Java language and virtual machine with value types, have them interoperate cleanly with existing generics, and have a compatible path for migrating our existing value-based classes to inline classes and our existing generic classes to specialized generics.”
The motivation behind Project Valhalla
One of the main motivations behind Project Valhalla was adapting the Java language and runtime to modern hardware. It’s almost been 25 years since Java was introduced and a lot has changed since then. At that time, the cost of a memory fetch and an arithmetic operation was roughly the same, but this is not the case now. Today, the memory fetch operations have become 200 to 1,000 times more expensive as compared to arithmetic operations.
Java is often considered to be a pointer-heavy language as most Java data structures in an application are objects or reference types. This is why Project Valhalla aims to introduce value types to get rid of the type overhead both in memory as well as in computation. Goetz wrote, “We aim to give developers the control to match data layouts with the performance model of today’s hardware, providing Java developers with an easier path to flat (cache-efficient) and dense (memory-efficient) data layouts without compromising abstraction or type safety.”
The language model for incorporating inline types
Goetz further moved on to talk about how the team is accommodating inline classes in the language type system. He wrote, “The motto for inline classes is: codes like a class, works like an int; the latter part of this motto means that inline types should align with the behaviors of primitive types outlined so far.” This means that inline classes will enable developers to write types that behave more like Java’s inbuilt primitive types.
Inline classes are similar to current classes in the sense that they can have properties, methods, constructors, and so on. However, the difference that Project Valhalla brings is that instances of inline classes or inline objects do not have an identity, the property that distinguishes them from other objects. This is why operations that are identity-sensitive like synchronization are not possible with inline objects.
There are a bunch of other differences between inline and identity classes. Goetz wrote, “Object identity serves, among other things, to enable mutability and layout polymorphism; by giving up identity, inline classes must give up these things. Accordingly, inline classes are implicitly final, cannot extend any other class besides Object…and their fields are implicitly final.”
In Project Valhalla, the types are divided into inline and reference types where inline types include primitives and reference types are those that are not inline types such as declared identity classes, declared interfaces, array types, etc.
He further listed a few migration scenarios including value-based classes, primitives, and specialized generics.
Check out Goetz’s post to know more in detail about the Project Valhalla.
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