June 19, 2026
Valhalla lives… cue the arguing
Project Valhalla, Explained: How a Decade of Work Arrives in JDK 28
After 10 years of “it’ll never happen,” Java fans are cheering, nitpicking, and fighting anyway
TLDR: Oracle says a long-promised Java upgrade is finally landing in JDK 28, though only as an early preview. The community reaction is peak internet: some are thrilled, some are nitpicking the design, and others are already asking whether Java just reinvented something .NET had years ago.
After a decade of delays, jokes, and outright disbelief, Project Valhalla is finally real enough to touch: Oracle says a major piece of it is headed for JDK 28, the next big Java release. In plain English, this long-running effort is meant to let Java programmers write normal-looking objects while getting speed and memory savings closer to the tiny built-in data types. The code drop is massive, and even Oracle insiders reportedly asked people to avoid other big changes while this monster lands. But the mood online is less victory parade, more “cool… but is this actually the full thing?”
That tension is where the fun starts. One camp is starry-eyed, with one commenter saying you could make a whole tech thriller out of the project’s tortured history and praising how the design somehow still “looked like Java” after years of debate. Another group instantly turned combative: one reader flatly rejected the idea that some of the design ideas were too hard for developers, basically calling that excuse nonsense. And then came the classic cross-platform side-eye, with someone asking the question guaranteed to start a flame war: isn’t this basically like .NET structs?
Meanwhile, the oldest meme in the room refuses to die. For years, people joked we’d reach Valhalla the Norse afterlife before Java’s Valhalla ever shipped. Now that it’s arriving in preview form, skeptics are already moving the goalposts from “they’ll never ship it” to “that’s not the important part.” Even the comment section opened with a gloriously petty “Dupe?” and a link, because no internet celebration is complete without someone trying to kill the party at the door.
Key Points
- •Oracle engineer Lois Foltan confirmed that JEP 401: Value Classes and Objects will be integrated into the main OpenJDK repository and is targeting JDK 28.
- •The integration is described as very large, with more than 197,000 lines of code added across 1,816 files, and committers were asked to avoid larger commits during the process.
- •The JDK 28 delivery is a preview feature disabled by default and is described as only the first part of Project Valhalla.
- •The article explains Valhalla’s goal as enabling constructs that 'code like a class, work like an int,' combining class-style programming with primitive-like efficiency.
- •The piece argues that Java’s reference-based object model leads to object-header overhead, allocation and garbage-collection costs, pointer indirection, and weaker cache locality, which dense layouts could reduce.