Beyond Loom: Practical Patterns for Virtual Threads, Structured Concurrency and Reactive Interop

Java’s virtual threads (Project Loom) changed the concurrency model, but the real value comes from practical patterns and trade-offs when adopting them at scale. This talk walks through concrete techniques for migrating services to virtual threads, applying structured concurrency to make code safer and easier to reason about, and interoperating with existing reactive and async stacks. You’ll see real-world demos: converting I/O-bound microservices, avoiding common pitfalls (thread-local state, blocking native libraries), benchmarking memory and latency, and hybrid designs that combine virtual threads with reactive streams. Attendees will leave with a pragmatic checklist, code patterns they can apply immediately, and metrics to judge when to adopt virtual threads vs. reactive/AOT approaches.