It's a long roadmap, but this is their ultimate objective. Once java has value classes, future carrier classes and member patterns, that's when we shall see some very huge interest for java in ML. Also, they plan to introduce typeclasses in which it will be convenient to introduce operator overloading, and collection/array literals etc syntax. The idea is to unify the types in java, and then enable much stronger semantics to ensure data oriented programming becomes ergonomic in java.
Valuetypes has been on the roadmap forever, meanwhile they put in the effort and bought out greenthreads out of retirement as virtual threads.
Even if they started properly on valuetypes today, it's probably still a 10 year slog to get the ecosystem to follow.
FWIW virtual threads are great this time around. That’s something whose time has come generally.
But yeah for me Java took a big leap forward when it got lambda but there hasn’t been another big leap since. Still so many obvious features and sugar to add to file off the sharp edges and remnants of enterpriseness.
Value types are a work in progress. It won't be (another) 10 years. Give it a few more releases.
Yup. They started transferring to the main line, but will require many tests to know if they have any issues. https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/pull/31120