Next Generation Project Valhalla Proposed

Earlier this week, Brian Goetz proposed Project Valhalla on an OpenJDK mailing list. Goetz's proposal states:

In accordance with the OpenJDK guidelines, this project will provide a venue to explore and incubate advanced Java VM and Language feature candidates such as Value Types, Generic Specialization, enhanced volatiles (and possibly other related topics, such as reified generics.)

Note that Goetz's proposal should not be confused with the 1997 version of Oracle's Project Valhalla that is described as "the code name for Oracle's flexible Java development environment for building, debugging and deploying component-based applications for the network computing platform." This "other" Project Valhalla is also described in the 15 December 1997 edition of InfoWorld: "Code-named Project Valhalla, the Oracle AppBuilder for Java is slated to ship in the first quarter of 1998. The Java tool, which is based on Borland's JBuilder Java IDE, is designed for writing n-tier, thin client applications."

The "other" Project Valhalla became AppBuilder for Java and was included with JDeveloper Suite (15 April 1998). The Oracle Application Server (4.0 at the time) that was part of this same JDeveloper Suite has new company at Oracle with Oracle's acquiring WebLogic with the BEA acquisition and acquiring GlassFish with the Sun acquisition and JDeveloper is an Oracle-provided (free in the "free beer" sense, but not open source) Java IDE.

Returning to the "next generation" of Project Valhalla, the voting on this Goetz proposal closes on 7 July 2014. Several have already expressed "yes" in replies to Goetz's original e-mail post. In that forum, Patrick Wright asked, "how is this/will this be different from the Da Vinci Project/MLVM?" and John Rose answered that "the charter for Da Vinci is to incubate JVM features for languages other than Java ... or for general language support without associated Java language changes" while "Valhalla is intended to support the evolution of Java itself."

I was excited about Project Coin when it was announced and enjoyed reading and hearing about its progress, but Project Valhalla would be much more ambitious and much more exciting if it is investigated and some or all of the proposed features are implemented.