Java: Plans for the Babylon, Valhalla, Panama and more projects in 2025
In a video, Nicolai Parlog presents the plans for JDK projects in 2025, including Babylon, Loom and Leyden, and provides insights into upcoming developments.
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On the official Java YouTube channel, Nicolai Parlog, Java Developer Advocate, has published a video in which he gives an overview of the expected developments of JDK projects in 2025. In this summary, he highlights various projects such as Babylon, Loom and Leyden and gives an outlook on what innovations the Java community can expect in 2025. He emphasizes that the plans are being talked about – but whether they will actually be implemented remains to be seen.
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Project Babylon and Loom
Project Babylon aims to extend Java to better support external programming models such as SQL, machine learning and GPU integration. In 2025, the team is focusing on developing a Java equivalent to ONNX Script, which may be presented at JavaOne in March 2025.
The ONNX script refers to the Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX), a format for exchanging machine learning models between different frameworks. A Java equivalent would offer developers similar functions in the Java ecosystem, particularly for machine learning.
With the Loom project, a team of developers is working on the handling of concurrency in Java through the introduction of virtual threads. The plans for 2025 include the completion of the Structured Concurrency API and the Scoped Values API, which are expected to be stabilized in JDK 25.
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Project Leyden and Lilliput
The team behind Project Leyden is working to optimize the startup time and memory footprint of Java applications by using Ahead-of-Time (AOT) techniques. Future developments will include AOT method profiling and code compilation to reduce the need for just-in-time compilation.
Project Lilliput focuses on memory optimization by reducing the size of object headers in the JVM. The project plans to further evaluate the experimental support and perform performance tests to reduce memory consumption.
Panama and Valhalla project
The aim of the Panama project is to optimize interoperability between Java and native code. It includes the further development of the Vector API and the Foreign Function and Memory (FFM) API, as well as general performance improvements to enable more efficient applications.
The Valhalla project focuses on the introduction of value types in Java to increase performance. For 2025, the team plans to explore null-controlled types and improve numerical computations to adapt Java to modern programming requirements and make the language more flexible. Null-controlled types in the Valhalla project are a concept that allows developers to explicitly control the nullability of value types, enabling them to create more precise and secure data models that simplify the handling of null values in Java and reduce potential sources of error.
Further information with the corresponding links in the description field can be found in the video by Nicolai Parlog on YouTube.
(mdo)
