I can't follow the reasoning here. To refute it, you'd only need to show a language with shared memory and futures with cancel(), right? Aside from that, a second shortcoming isn't a good excuse for the first.

> You can get a lot better nonblocking support with third party libraries.

I don't doubt this. Another example is vavr.io, which gives much better Lists/Optionals/Streams than the standard Java 8 ones. And Joda-Time before that.

> RxJava is almost a requirement when doing non-blocking code.

Why can't CompletableFutures do what RxJava did?

> it relies on OS threads which aren't safe to cancel. Userspace threads don't have that problem

This bit was the most confusing to me. In my shitty understanding of the model, Java Threads are based on OS threads, which is why they're relatively heavy. CFs on the other hand are are lighter and managed by the Java runtime. Why is it then that I can cancel Threads, but I cannot cancel CFs. Your explanation would seem to justify the opposite.

I'm not 100% sure on what you mean by an optional interrupt, but I'm guessing it's the boolean flag on the cancel(); Let's look!

    public boolean cancel(boolean mayInterruptIfRunning) {
        boolean cancelled = this.result == null && this.internalComplete(new CompletableFuture.AltResult(new CancellationException()));
        this.postComplete();
        return cancelled || this.isCancelled();
    }

Try it.

    @Test
    public void cannotCancelARunningFuture() {

        // Future that just sleeps
        CompletableFuture<Void> sleeping =
                CompletableFuture.supplyAsync(() -> {
                    int i = 0;
                    while (true) {
                        System.out.println("zzzz: " + i++);
                        threadSleep(300);
                    }
                });

        // Make sure it started
        threadSleep(1000);

        sleeping.cancel(true);
        System.out.println("Sleep was cancelled");

        threadSleep(1000);
        System.out.println("Haha no it wasn't");
    }

  zzzz: 0
  zzzz: 1
  zzzz: 2
  zzzz: 3
  Sleep was cancelled
  zzzz: 4
  zzzz: 5
  zzzz: 6
  Haha no it wasn't