The fight for performance Is reactive programming the right approach?

This continuation can be passed as a callback (a function invoked with the I/O outcome), or use more advanced constructs such as reactive programming or co-routines. Regardless of how the continuation is expressed, the essential aspect is the release of the I/O thread and, as a consequence, the fact that this thread can be used to process another request. When the scheduled I/O completes, the I/O thread executes the continuation, and the processing of the pending request continues.

The Kotlin equivalent uses coroutine contexts as synchronization points.

At this point, the thread is returned to the thread pool and goes on to do the other tasks. When DB responds, it is again handled by some thread from the thread pool and it returns an HTTP response. In comes Project Loom with virtual threads that become the single unit of concurrency.

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This simplifies development, as you do not need to use reactive programming to write scalable code. Another benefit is that lots of legacy code can use this optimization without much change in the code base. I would say Project Loom brings similar capability as goroutines and allows Java programmers to write internet scale applications without reactive programming. As you might have noticed from the examples, Kotlin’s syntax offers more flexibility in terms of nesting.

• Besides, once Loom is final, also Kotlin coroutines will directly use the same interface.
• And debugging is indeed painful, and if one of the intermediary stages results with an exception, the control-flow goes hay-wire, resulting in further code to handle it.
• With Loom, we write synchronous code, and let someone else decide what to do when blocked.
• This is your concern about divorcing the concepts.
• In addition, these threads are blocked as soon as your code interacts with remote services.

The direct interaction with OS threads gives Java an edge on performance compared to Kotlin (but let’s wait first for Loom to be released till we draw conclusions). For developers this means that structured concurrency is available in https://globalcloudteam.com/ Kotlin and Java. As a result, the I/O thread can handle multiple concurrent requests, improving the overall concurrency of the application. In the traditional and imperative approach, frameworks assign a thread to handle the request.

Bootstrapping the Reactive Fruits application

A more realistic one would strive for collecting from a dynamic pool which kept one real thread for every blocked system call + one for every real CPU. At least that is what the folks behind Go came up with. To give some context here, I have been following Project Loom for some time now.

RESTEasy Reactive automatically maps the list into a JSON Array, except if instructed otherwise. Verify that Maven is using the Java version you expect. If you have multiple JDKs installed, make sure Maven is using the expected one. You can verify which JDK Maven uses by running mvn –version. This repository contains an experiment that uses a Spring Boot application with Virtual Threads.

Project Loom team has done a great job on this front, and Fiber can take the Runnable interface. To be complete, note that Continuation also implements Runnable. Consider an application in which all the threads are waiting for a database to respond.

Imperative vs. Reactive: a question of threads

Loom introduces coroutines, termed virtual threads, as native element into the JVM. The Loom development team chose not to deviate from existing syntax. The thread-API stays more-or-less the same. The big difference to Kotlin is that Loom’s virtual threads are managed and scheduled by the JVM instead of the operating system. They skip the indirection via the traditional JVM thread abstraction.

You can learn more about reactive programming here and in this free e-book by Clement Escoffier. Join developers across the globe for live and virtual events led by Red Hat technology experts. Red Hat OpenShift Open, hybrid-cloud Kubernetes platform to build, run, and scale container-based applications — now with developer tools, CI/CD, and release management. I maintain some skepticism, as the research typically shows a poorly scaled system, which is transformed into a lock avoidance model, then shown to be better. I have yet to see one which unleashes some experienced developers to analyze the synchronization behavior of the system, transform it for scalability, then measure the result. But, even if that were a win experienced developers are a rare and expensive commodity; the heart of scalability is really financial.

Java runtimes and frameworks Deploy your application safely and securely into your production environment without system or resource limitations. I understand that Netty is more than just Reactive/Event Loop framework, it also has all the codecs for various protocols, which implementations will be useful somehow anyway, even afterwards. I may be wrong, but as far as I understand, the whole Reactive/Event Loop thing, and Netty in particular, was invented as an answer to the C10K+ problem. It has obvious drawbacks, as all your code now becomes Async, with ugly callbacks, meaningless stack traces, and therefore hard to maintain and to reason about. As 1 indicates, there are tangible results that can be directly linked to this approach; and a few intangibles.

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The HTTP server just spawns virtual threads for every request. If there is an IO, the virtual thread just waits for the task to complete. Basically, there is no pooling business going on for the virtual threads. With loom, there isn’t a need to chain multiple CompletableFuture’s . And with each blocking operation encountered (ReentrantLock, i/o, JDBC calls), the virtual-thread gets parked.

Used for streaming programming and functional programming. Hands-on security architect with a nack for security, automation, and risk management. Jeroen has been involved in various OWASP projects. He enjoys a pentest every now and then, while helping organizations to get secure enough.

Each one is a stage, and the resultant CompletablFuture is returned back to the web-framework. With Loom, a more powerful abstraction is the savior. We have seen this repeatedly on how abstraction with syntactic sugar, makes one effectively write programs. Whether it was FunctionalInterfaces in JDK8, for-comprehensions in Scala.

Reactive Resource

Currently reactive programming paradigms are often used to solve performance problems, not because they fit the problem. Those should be covered completely via project Loom. Note that this leaves the PEA divorced from the underlying system thread, because they are internally multiplexed between them. This is your concern about divorcing the concepts.

This approach resolves the problem of context switching but introduces lots of complexity in the program itself. This type of program also scales better, which is one reason reactive programming has become very popular in recent times. Vert.x is one such library that helps Java developers write code in a reactive manner. If you do not do anything exotic, it does not matter, in terms of performance, if you submit all tasks with one executor or with two. The try-with-resources construct allows to introduce “structure into your concurrency”. If you want to get more exotic, then Loom provides possibilities to restrict virtual threads to a pool of carrier threads.

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And comes back to continue the execution of the original virtual-thread whenever unparked. But here, you have a single carrier-thread in a way executing the body of multiple virtual-threads, switching from one to another when blocked. The HTTP server has a dedicated pool of threads. When a request comes in, a thread carries the task up until it reaches the DB, wherein the task has to wait for the response from DB.

Further, each thread has some memory allocated to it, and only a limited number of threads can be handled by the operating system. This approach gives developers plenty of room to make mistakes or confuse existing and unrelated concurrency abstractions with the new constructs. In addition, business intent is blurred by the extra verbosity of Java. Project Loom is coming to the JDK soon and proposes a virtual thread-based model. The Quarkus architecture is ready to support Loom as soon as it’s become globally available.

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To write to a database, we need a transaction. So we use Panache.withTransaction to get one and call the persist method when we receive the transaction. The persist method is also returning a Uni. This Uni emits the result of the project loom java insertion of the fruit in the database. Once the insertion completes (and that’s our continuation), we create a 201 CREATED response. RESTEasy Reactive automatically reads the request body as JSON and creates the Fruit instance.

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In practice, you pass around your favourite languages abstraction of a context pointer. Loom is more about a native concurrency abstraction, which additionally helps one write asynchronous code. Given its a VM level abstraction, rather than just code level , It lets one implement asynchronous behavior but with reduce boiler plate.

But you may wonder what the differences and benefits are in comparison to the traditional and imperative model. Instead of allocating one OS thread per Java thread , Project Loom provides additional schedulers that schedule the multiple lightweight threads on the same OS thread. This approach provides better usage and much less context switching.