Tech Blog of Stephen Souness

Virtual Threads Improved  I'm starting to dip my thoughts back into technology, in preparation for getting back into interviewing and getting back to working. This week I had a listen to the latest episode of Josh Long's "A bootiful podcast" and was surprised to hear a strong push for going with non long term support (LTS) versions of Java. A few days later I was watching a presentation about how NetFlix is using Java in 2025 ( JavaOne presentation on Youtube ), sure enough there Java 24 is also being applied in order to benefit from improvements to the use of virtual threads. JEP 491  "Synchronize Virtual Threads without Pinning" seems to be enough of a driver for some organisations to push forward outside of the Long Term Support versions. Non LTS in prod? I've seen companies apply a simple policy of only permitting LTS versions in production, so now I'm curious about whether the broader Java community is moving away from that approach. Potential ...

Introduction I've been catching up on some features that have been added in recent versions of Java. The 6 month release cadence of new versions of Java is great, but can lead to a build up of new things to learn about. The support for pattern matching in switch statements - JEP 406 - is particularly appealing, but for now it is still only available as a preview feature, meaning that at compile time and at run time we need to explicitly specify to enable preview. A shallow view of the main cloud providers A lot of online applications these days will run in some sort of cloud runtime environment.  Some examples from the main cloud providers are: AWS Lambda Azure Functions   Google Cloud Function   According to what the documentation currently specifies, AWS Lambda's pre-packaged Java environments only support versions 8 and 11 unless you bring your own Docker container. Similarly, Azure Functions only offer versions 8 and 11. This leaves us to consider Google Cloud Functi...