- Native threads are great. They have a lot of uses, why touch them
- Automatic conversion will break a lot of stuff and eliminate some of the benefits of native threads. Being able to use an API/implementation that is *almost* the same is a huge beneift
- The memory model is a completely separate thing that Java worked on for decades. You don't want to touch that and you don't need to
- Inter-thread communication is a separate thing. There's no reason to go after that. Same is true for the data parallelism stuff.
The focus should be on hitting the 98% of what matters and getting it out without breaking everything we already have.
While automatic conversion might be off the table, any library that expects (or allows) the caller to supply the ThreadFactory used to created thread will should make switching over pretty easy. Just construct the factory with `Thread.ofVirtual().factory()`, and provide it to the library. And if it is code you own, spawning threads, then switching over should be a pretty mechanical process.
On the memory model: I'd argue that technically the memory model would be implicitly updated to treat these virtual threads the same as classic threads. Which is a very minor update. Beyond that, in order to maintain that memory model, the implementation will need to ensure proper barriers are used on pausing and resuming virtual threads, so that a virtual thread resumed on a different physical core is guaranteed to see any of its previous writes (as would be expected within a "single thread").
- Native threads are great. They have a lot of uses, why touch them
- Automatic conversion will break a lot of stuff and eliminate some of the benefits of native threads. Being able to use an API/implementation that is *almost* the same is a huge beneift
- The memory model is a completely separate thing that Java worked on for decades. You don't want to touch that and you don't need to
- Inter-thread communication is a separate thing. There's no reason to go after that. Same is true for the data parallelism stuff.
The focus should be on hitting the 98% of what matters and getting it out without breaking everything we already have.