Looking forward

With Java 9 done, then, the natural question is, What is next? As you might expect, the engineers at companies such as Oracle, Red Hat, IBM, Azul Systems, and others have been thinking about this question even while Java 9 was being planned and developed. While it is next to impossible to say what Java 10 will hold with any certainty (remember it took three major releases to get the module system done), we do have several items that are currently being discussed and designed, with the hope of shipping them in the next release. Over the next few pages, we'll explore some of these to get an early look at what our life as Java developers might be like in a couple of years.

Project Valhalla

Project Valhalla is an incubation grounds for advanced language-VM co-development projects. It is being led by Oracle engineer, Brian Goetz. As of this writing, there are three planned features for Valhalla. They are value types, generic specialization, and reified generics.

Value types

The goal...