GOTO - The Brightest Minds in Tech
The GOTO podcast seeks out the brightest and boldest ideas from language creators and the world's leading experts in software development in the form of interviews and conference talks. Tune in to get the inspiration you need to bring in new technologies or gain extra evidence to support your software development plan.
GOTO - The Brightest Minds in Tech
Modern Concurrency in Java • Bazlur Rahman & Michael Redlich
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This interview was recorded for the GOTO Book Club.
http://gotopia.tech/bookclub
A N M Bazlur Rahman - Java Champion & Author of "Modern Concurrency in Java"
Michael Redlich - Java Champion & Lead Java Queue News Editor at InfoQ
Check out more here:
https://gotopia.tech/episodes/443
RESOURCES
Bazlur
https://bsky.app/profile/bazlur.ca
https://x.com/bazlur_rahman
https://github.com/rokon12
https://www.linkedin.com/in/bazlur
https://bio.site/bazlur
https://bazlur.ca
Michael
https://twitter.com/mpredli
https://github.com/mpredli01
https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-redlich-13a966
https://about.me/mpredli
DESCRIPTION
In this GOTO Book Club episode, Java Champion A N M Bazlur Rahman joins host and fellow Java Champion Michael Redlich to discuss Modern Concurrency in Java — the first comprehensive update to Java concurrency literature in 20 years. Bazlur traces his motivation to the arrival of virtual threads in JDK 21, which he describes as a fundamental shift in Java's concurrency cost model: platform threads were expensive and scarce, demanding careful pooling; virtual threads are cheap, plentiful, and behave like ordinary threads from the developer's perspective, without requiring a new programming model. The book covers this evolution end-to-end, from the history of threads through to structured concurrency, scope values, and the modern frameworks that have already adopted virtual threads — most with a single config change.
The conversation also takes a nuanced look at reactive programming's future. Bazlur's conclusion is that reactive remains compelling in specific contexts — event-driven streaming systems, architectures needing end-to-end back-pressure — but it's no longer the default answer to scalability. For most microservices doing blocking I/O, virtual threads are now the stronger default, and reactive becomes a deliberate architectural choice rather than an automatic one. The book's goal is to give developers both the conceptual grounding and the practical guidance to make that choice confidently — understanding the tool one level deep, so they can design better systems, not just configure their way through a framework.
RECOMMENDED BOOKS
A N M Bazlur Rahman • Modern Concurrency in Java • https://amzn.to/42w8cOk
Ben Evans & Jim Gough • Optimizing Cloud Native Java • https://amzn.to/41nivD9
Ben Evans, Jason Clark & David Flanagan • Java in a Nutshell • https://amzn.to/43FDoMA
Ian F. Darwin • Java Cookbook 5th ed. • https://amzn.to/3QH0NZy
Victor Grazi & Jeanne Boyarsky • Real-World Java • https://amzn.to/4oCEeBR
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