Java 8 Lambdas

Chapter 6. Data Parallelism

I’ve previously made a lot of references to the idea that it’s easier to write parallel code in Java 8. This is because we can use lambda expressions in combination with the streams library, introduced in Chapter 3, to say what we want our program to do, regardless of whether it’s sequential or parallel. I know that sounds a lot like what you’ve been doing in Java for years, but there’s a difference between saying what you want to compute and saying how to compute it.

The big shift between external and internal iteration (also discussed in Chapter 3) did make it easier to write simple and clean code, but here’s the other big benefit: now we don’t have to manually control the iteration. It doesn’t need to be performed sequentially. We express the what and, by changing a single method call, we can get a library to figure out the how.

The changes to your code are surprisingly unobtrusive, so the majority of this chapter won’t be talking about how your code changes. Instead, I’ll explain why you might want to go parallel and when you’ll get performance improvements. It’s also worth noting that this chapter isn’t a general text on performance in Java; we’ll just be looking at the easy wins provided in Java 8.

Parallelism Versus Concurrency

After a quick scan over the table of contents of this book, you might have noticed this chapter with the word parallelism in the title and also Chapter 9, which has concurrency in the title. Don’t worry—I haven’t repeated the ...