Uploaded February 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
For years, the Java community has been told that Project Loom would kill reactive programming — that blocking and async were destined to be enemies. But what if that story was wrong?
In this talk, we’ll explore what happens when these two worlds actually fall in love.
Drawing from real-world work inside the Quarkus, Vert.x, Netty, and HotSpot teams, we’ll see how a custom Loom scheduler built on top of Netty brings together the performance of event-driven I/O and the simplicity of virtual-thread-friendly blocking APIs.
This isn’t a theoretical “what if”: it’s a data-driven exploration born from experiments and collaborations between IBM, Oracle Labs, Oracle and Apple engineering teams.
You’ll see how this approach reshapes how we think about async, concurrency, and scheduling — and why some of the long-held assumptions about “reactive vs blocking” simply don’t hold up when measured scientifically.
Along the way, we’ll dissect:
- How the Loom scheduler and virtual threads work under the hood.
- What happens when you run them over a Netty core
- Performance implications and trade-offs measured empirically.
- State of art of similar patterns from other languages (c++, go, ...)
- Why developers should challenge inherited dogmas and base design choices on data, not folklore
This talk is a technical love story, but also a call to reason: Measure, Don’t Guess.
Because sometimes, the forbidden relationships are the ones that can move the platform forward.
For years, the Java community has been told that Project Loom would kill reactive programming — that blocking and async were destined to be enemies. But what if that story was wrong?
In this talk, we’ll explore what happens when these two worlds actually fall in love.
Drawing from real-world work inside the Quarkus, Vert.x, Netty, and HotSpot teams, we’ll see how a custom Loom scheduler built on top of Netty brings together the performance of event-driven I/O and the simplicity of virtual-thread-friendly blocking APIs.
This isn’t a theoretical “what if”: it’s a data-driven exploration born from experiments and collaborations between IBM, Oracle Labs, Oracle and Apple engineering teams.
You’ll see how this approach reshapes how we think about async, concurrency, and scheduling — and why some of the long-held assumptions about “reactive vs blocking” simply don’t hold up when measured scientifically.
Along the way, we’ll dissect:
- How the Loom scheduler and virtual threads work under the hood.
- What happens when you run them over a Netty core
- Performance implications and trade-offs measured empirically.
- State of art of similar patterns from other languages (c++, go, ...)
- Why developers should challenge inherited dogmas and base design choices on data, not folklore
This talk is a technical love story, but also a call to reason: Measure, Don’t Guess.
Because sometimes, the forbidden relationships are the ones that can move the platform forward.
![[VDBUH2026] Julien Topçu - Hexagonal Architecture in Practice](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/QZrl5tghsTA/mqdefault.jpg "[VDBUH2026] Julien Topçu - Hexagonal Architecture in Practice
There always comes a point where software becomes so complex and old that it becomes unmaintainable. Updating the technical stack without breaking everything becomes impossible, implementing new features takes longer, and the technical debt is so overwhelming that refactoring becomes exorbitant.
What if we told you that all of this is more of a practice problem than a software aging problem?
Come and discover through hands-on experience in this 100% live coding session how Hexagonal Architecture can tackle software complexity, making it possible for you to be adaptable and sustainable while helping you manage your technical debt more effectively.")
