This talk is about the evolution of Java and the Java Virtual Machine to add Value Types and extend Generics to support Value Types and Primitives. We will explore Project Valhalla, our current advanced explorations for adding immutable, identity-free types to support user-defined by-value data types such as complex, vectors and tuples. We will discuss some of the challenges and solutions for ensuring backward compatibility and future migration with incremental deliverables for a large existing codebase.

Karen is the Architect and Technical Lead for the Hotspot Java Virtual Machine Runtime team at Oracle. She began her career in operating systems and networking, and has been working on the internals of various Java virtual machines since 2000. In addition to steering all of the Hotspot JVM Runtime technical development, her recent individual contributions to the JVM have been to value types (Valhalla), modules (Jigsaw), default methods (Lambda), and parallel class loading.