What is struct layouts and VarHandle in Java?

In Java, struct layouts refer to a way of organizing data in memory to closely resemble the layout of a struct in other programming languages like C. This can be particularly useful when interfacing with native code or handling binary data formats.

VarHandle, introduced in Java 9, is a flexible mechanism for accessing and modifying variables in shared memory with a variety of memory consistency guarantees. It allows developers to perform atomic operations and is a part of the java.lang.invoke package.


struct layouts VarHandle Java memory management atomic operations data structures