Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Can we expect that kind of horror to fade away as Java evolves?

In the .Net world there's the ThreadPool class to manage the single process-wide thread-pool, and the Task class to enqueue and orchestrate concurrent jobs (it uses ThreadPool and almost completely abstracts away the thread management).

(You could write your own thread-pool, of course, but for most code that wouldn't make sense.)

As I understand it, the JVM is rather behind in this department. (Not to mention async/await.)




> In the .Net world there's the ThreadPool class to manage the single process-wide thread-pool, and the Task class to enqueue and orchestrate concurrent jobs (it uses ThreadPool and almost completely abstracts away the thread management). > (You could write your own thread-pool, of course, but for most code that wouldn't make sense.)

Java had thread pools and tasks since 2004 (https://docs.oracle.com/javase/1.5.0/docs/api/java/util/conc...). For typical Java programs, no one is writing their own thread pool functionality as far as I know.


Java has these concepts too (ExecutorService since at least Java 5, circa 2004). The problem is not with the JDK libraries, it's been in the JVM's assumption that it's running on bare metal or a VM.

Linux containers leak information about the "true" environment in a way that upset JVM assumptions before 9 and 10.


.NET has the same problem: Each process would create one thread pool thread per CPU core, and you could end up with excessive context switching.

Java possibly makes it a bit easier to work around, really, in that Java forces you to initialize your thread pool, so it wouldn't feel quite so weird to add a "# of threads in thread pool" setting to an app config file for something. I'm guessing that's not the Docker way of doing it, though.


java.util.concurrent is actually more advanced that TPL, with contributions from Doug Lea.

Java just lacks async/await primitives.


java.util.concurrent certainly has more buttons and levers you can fiddle with. I could probably burn at least a week trying to grok the whole thing.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: