Async Is the New 'goto': What Modern Java Concurrency Is Really About

For years, we’ve relied on asynchronous functions—from simple thread launches to observable subscriptions and event handlers. While these tools solved our scaling problems, they quietly broke the fundamental rules we never knew we loved (spoiler, it’s structured programming!). They act like modern-day goto statements, ripping execution out of predictable scopes and making cancellation, exception handling, and resource management notoriously difficult to reason about. In this talk, we will learn what we can gain from Java’s upcoming structured concurrency feature. We will use a custom-built visual debugger to give you, I dare to say, the last explanation of structured concurrency you will ever need! Join me to discover how we can un-break our concurrent programs, regain the strict guarantees we lost, and safely confine the complexity of running millions of concurrent tasks.