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Comment by germandiago | Hacker News Reader

2934 commits OMG... huge work.

There is just a high level of a professionalism around the whole project. Who is sponsoring all of this? Do they all work for Oracle?

Valhalla is 99% done by Oracle, yes.

I’m impressed by their uncharacteristic discipline and long term vision. In the big tech I know this would get pushed early.

I'd say it is very characteristic of the Java team at Oracle to be committed to discipline and long term vision.

I strongly suggest watching some of their talks from JVMLS (JVM Language Summit), especially the ones from Brian Goetz and Mark Reinhold.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLX8CzqL3ArzUOgZpIX6Gs...

The way pull requests and commits work in the OpenJDK repository -- a bot squashes each pull request into one commit: https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/pull/31120#issuecomment-51378...

The final singular commit is cc278db (8389219: Implement JEP 401: Value Objects (Preview), 2026-07-31) https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/commit/cc278dbb8a1ca0754d5842...

Is there a writeup on why they choose to destroy the history?

You can recover the history using their tooling build on top of their bugtracker and GitHub. Specifically they capture the discussions and all small changes over time in their skara tools and are prepared to leave GitHub if needed. They had multi de adres experience and had multiple prior code repos. Still do if i understand as the Oracle team has the sun and bea code repositories pre openjdk preserved.

Before openjdk did move to github, they made sure they had a solution for those problems:

* Contributors without github accounts * Moving away from github (when needed) * No vendor lock-in for github stuff.

I personally think, this is a good idea - a lot of work, but may be worth it in the long run.

Hmm. Is this about Github or Git? Dependency on Github seems tangential to treating Git as a first class record of history.

edit: rereading, I guess the implication is that there's tooling built on top of Github outside of Git, so Git history is indeed not meant to be contain some things.

Yes, massive respect for that type of perseverance on long term, important changes.

My favorite feature from Java is the same as my favorite feature from C++: pick something 10 years later or more, and it works nearly flawlessly.

Also, now on the Java side: I think they made a great job avoiding async/await and using virtual threads. Amazing results.

I also like all the work done around structured concurrency.

It's a project years in the making.

Seems like a horrible way to work. Why could this not have landed as a large amount of smaller PRs in a more incremental fashion, maybe Java users could have gotten some value out of it earlier.

Out of all factors this certainly isn't it. If anything, more projects could learn from the way Valhalla was handled.

It started out as a highly invasive, highly disruptive and highly experimental branch that eventually turned into a beautiful specification that put semantics and performance payoff first and syntax seconds.

This is incremental. This change is the smallest possible one that could work. There are more coming in later.

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