There are a couple of new concurrency utilities in Java 8. The
most relevant one is CompletableFuture. The regular Future is used
for retrieval of a result that is produced by a task (typically a task
that is executed in a thread pool). For this purpose the regular
Future supports waiting for the result and retrieving it once it has been
produced. After retrieval the result is processed synchronously.
The new CompletableFuture, in contrast, supports asynchronous result processing:
we need not wait until the result of a task has been produced, instead
we can upfront specify an action (the result processing) that will later
be executed automatically when the result appears.
In addition, Java 8 comes with a couple of minor extensions related
to concurrency: StampedLock (a ReadWriteLock with optimistic Read), LongAdder
/ LongAccumulator (as an alternative to AtomicLong), new operations in
ConcurrentHashMap (e.g.. computeIfAbsent, forEach, reduce, search), the
Common Pool (a singleton ForkJoinPool) and the @Contended annotation (to
prevent False Sharing). |