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0 pointsweatherlight4y ago0 comments

In OpenJDK, Java threads are just thin wrappers around OS threads and OS threads are a very precious resource; a modern OS can't support more than a few thousand active threads at a time.

I'm not sure how one would get there with the JVM's memory model. you'd need something like actors and a preemptive scheduler per core at the VM level with a share nothing state between actors/virtual threads. Erlang utilizes message passing and immutability to do this.

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pjmlp4y ago

Which is precisely why Java language specifications doesn't state if they are green or red threads, they just happened to evolve into red threads across multiple implementations.

Project Loom is bringing green threads back, now officially as virtual threads.

Additionally there is java.util.concurrent and for those that care to really go deep enough, custom schedulers.

papercrane4y ago

> I'm not sure how one would get there with the JVM's memory model. you'd need something like actors and a preemptive scheduler per core at the VM level with a share nothing state between actors/virtual threads.

Part of what Project Loom is doing is bringing lightweight usermode threads, called "Virtual Threads" and it's own scheduler.

Importantly you don't need share nothing state or immutability to add preemption, the JVM already has points during code execution where it knows the full state of the program. They call these "safepoints" and they're important for the GC to work properly. With the current implementation of Loom virtual threads are preempted when they do any blocking I/O or synchronization, but there's no reason why in the future they couldn't preempt them at any safepoint.

Kranar4y ago

>In OpenJDK, Java threads are just thin wrappers around OS threads and OS threads are a very precious resource; a modern OS can't support more than a few thousand active threads at a time.

I don't know what you define as a few thousand active threads, but running the following C++ code let me run 70,000 threads before I got a resource error:

https://godbolt.org/z/74GsY1Kds

weatherlightOP4y ago

Erlang processes are not OS processes. They are implemented by the Erlang VM using a lightweight cooperative threading model (preemptive at the Erlang level, but under the control of a cooperatively scheduled runtime). This means that it is much cheaper to switch context, because they only switch at known, controlled points and therefore don't have to save the entire CPU state (normal, SSE and FPU registers, address space mapping, etc.). Erlang processes use dynamically allocated stacks, which start very small and grow as necessary. This permits the spawning of many hundreds of thousands — even millions — of Erlang processes without sucking up all available RAM. Erlang used to be single-threaded, meaning that there was no requirement to ensure thread-safety between processes. It now supports SMP, but the interaction between Erlang processes on the same scheduler/core is still very lightweight (there are separate run queues per core).

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse