A JavaOne talk maps where the JVM's JIT compilers are still gaining
Serguey Asael Shinder1 min readInside Java published, on 21 September 2026, an overview by Oracle's Roberto Castañeda Lozano of recent and ongoing improvements to the JVM's just-in-time compilers, framed as a JavaOne 2026 talk.
The claim worth keeping is structural: JIT compilation is not a finished subsystem but the place where several headline projects land. The talk ties JIT work to Valhalla (value types), Leyden (startup and warmup) and Panama (native interop) — three efforts whose user-visible promises all depend, in the end, on what the compiler can prove and specialise.
This is a talk, not a release: there is no version number here and nothing to upgrade to. It is a map of where the effort is going.
What it means
Performance is increasingly a compiler-frontend story, not a GC story. For a decade the JVM's headline performance work was garbage collection. The projects named here move the frontier to what the JIT can do with richer type information and fewer object headers — which is why Valhalla keeps appearing in performance talks that are ostensibly about language features.
A talk like this is a reading list. The value is in which projects a compiler engineer puts next to each other. If you are deciding where JVM performance will come from over the next few releases, the pairing of Valhalla, Leyden and Panama is the answer being given from inside the team.