The Valhalla project in OpenJDK has been exploring adding value types to Java and the JVM. This will hopefully come to fruition in one of the upcoming versions of the Java platform (though definitely not 9). In this talk, I will describe what value types and generic specialization are and show them live using the Valhalla prototype. I will also briefly touch another related topic, ObjectLayout.org. During these explanations, I will repeatedly stress the importance of reference locality to application performance and illustrate the difference using a couple of small JMH benchmarks.
