Early Access Loom Builds

[Ron Pressler]

Early Access OpenJDK binaries that include Project Loom are now available for
download (the download page has a link to the Javadoc). [1]

The release of Early Access builds does not indicate anything about the
project's readiness or status other than us wanting to solicit feedback from a
wider set of users. The best way to help is to download the Early Access
binaries, try Loom out, and report about your experience. Both the API as well
as the implementation are still far from stable, and are expected to change very
frequently.

We are mostly interested in feedback on the following:


 - Given current Loom limitations (such as held monitors pinning threads), how hard
   is it to migrate existing code to work well with fibers? 
 - Structured concurrency: is it helpful? What can be improved? 
 - Which use cases are important to you, and are they well-served by Loom?

Loom is ultimately a project that is intended to help with scalability and
performance, and both speed and footprint are primary concerns for the project.
But while we are *very* interested in your performance/footprint *requirements*
and the kind of workloads you want Loom to help with, performance/footprint
benchmarks are not helpful at this stage, as the implementation is far from
stable and experiences frequent changes with possibly drastic impact to
speed/footprint. First we make it work; then we make it fast.

Bug reports are welcome. If you encounter a bug, please report it to this
mailing list.

Your feedback on the experience of using Loom will not only be appreciated, but
will help us deliver Loom sooner.

Thank you!

Ron


[1] http://jdk.java.net/loom/