The sinuous path toward Valhalla

When Java was created at the beginning of the 90s, the cost of a pointer dereference and the cost of addition were roughly similar. Nowadays, we have hardware with hundreds of gigs of RAM, the cost of a pointer dereference is 3 order magnitude the cost of an addition, so the Java model of every object is a reference to an address in RAM is not aligned anymore with the current state of the hardware. It's time for a little lifting.

"The OpenJDK project Valhalla starts 5 years ago, and aims to introduce a new kind of object, the inline object." During this session, Remi will tell the history of the Valhalla project, the choices that have been made, the breakthrough, what still needs to be done and when the project will land in the main OpenJDK branch.

This talk is for the courageous that are not afraid about bytecode representation, VM internals and work in progress details.