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Comment by andrewbinstock | Hacker News Reader

Author here. No threading currently. Once we have all the bytecodes executing, we will perforce be obliged to add threading. Starting with the heavier threading that Java pre-Loom uses.

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Can you just use green threads (goroutines) from the get-go? Or, by Hyrum's law, is the fact that legacy Java threads are really OS threads part of Java's de facto public API?

You have to distinguish between the implementation and the interface from the Java point of view. In Go, you'd use goroutines. Even if you want to use an OS thread you use a goroutine and then pin it to an OS thread, and there's no reason to do that in this case.

However, inside Java it may look like the original Threading API. In that case you'd have a JVM running the Thread abstraction in Java on top of green threads in Go, while not supporting Java green threads, and there's no contradiction or even anything weird going on. Perfectly normal.

Right right, but I wonder if there is some weird edge case where some Java program relies on threads being real OS threads...like, for sure Java threads being OS threads is an observable feature of a running Java program (you can see it in htop!). And maybe someone has built a Java based system somewhere that uses that...

I recall seeing some really hacky Java implementations that used thread references for state management... Mostly, in that the same devs expected the same experience in the C# ASP.Net lifecycle and it lead to a lot of wierd race bug conditions in practice.

That's a good question. I don't know enough about the new green threads to give you a definitive answer, but it's certainly something we'll examine closely.

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