You can implement Go's thread model (more generally known as green threads, coroutines, fibers, lightweight threads) on the JVM. This is precisely what Project Loom intends to do and what Scala effect systems already do. You construct a program in a type called IO that only describes a computation that can be suspended and resumed, unlike Java Runnables. These IO values are cooperatively scheduled to run on a fixed thread pool. Because these IO values just represent continuations, you can have millions of them cooperatively executing at the same time. And there is no context switch penalty for switching the continuation you are executing for another.