Mark Price

In the world of low-latency Java almost all frameworks rely, to some degree, on the infamous sun.misc.Unsafe. For a while, it looked as though the release of Java 9 was going to remove one of the key building blocks of high-performance software. Part of the argument for its removal was that Java 9 introduced new features that could serve as a replacement; some in the community were unconvinced. The future of this key piece of technology is as-yet undecided.

This talk explores advanced use of Java 9 features to implement a fast, garbage-free, and low-latency event processing framework. We will compare the real cost of using ‘legal’ language features vs Unsafe, and see what needs to be implemented at the language/JVM level in order to reach parity of raw performance – without sacrificing safety.