On June 15, Oracle engineer Lois Foltan confirmed what a good chunk of the industry had stopped believing: JEP 401: Value Classes and Objects will be integrated into the main OpenJDK repository and is targeting JDK 28. The change is so large that the remaining committers were asked to hold off on bigger commits during the integration. The pull request alone adds over 197 thousand lines of code across 1,816 files. Before we pop the champagne, though: this is preview , disabled by default, and, as Brian Goetz was quick to cool everyone down, “only the first part of Valhalla.” Goetz added a great observation that the “they’ll never ship it” crowd will now smoothly switch over to “but they didn’t ship the most important part” (and a joke has been going around the community for years that we’ll sooner end up in Valhalla ourselves, the Norse-afterlife one, than the project ships). You have to earn your own haters. So this is a good moment to tell the whole story.…