Parallel Programming

Sometimes it’s not enough for something to work - it has to work under load. In modern applications that process large amounts of data, the Streams API in Java provides developers with an elegant, declarative tool to transform, filter, and aggregate data in pipelines. ​​Describing complex data operations with just a few lines is seductive and realistic. But what happens when these operations encounter millions of entries? When should execution be done in multiple threads in parallel to save time and effectively use multi-core systems?

Since the early days of computer science, parallel processing has represented one of the greatest challenges and opportunities. Since its inception in 1995, Java has undergone a significant journey in the world of parallel programming to provide developers with ever-better tools. This story is a fascinating journey through threads, the executor framework, fork/join, parallel streams, CompletableFuture and the latest developments in Project Loom. In this blog post, we take a detailed look at the evolution of parallel processing in Java and the innovations that came with it.