[jpgvm]

The runtime is similar, both are continuation based under the hood etc.

What sets VirtualThread apart is that all the support you get from the Java Stdlib. i.e ExecutorService and friends and now ThreadGroup with the improvements in Java 21. Not to mention the structured concurrency features that are planned to complement them. Another key difference is how much easier they interact with interrupts for cancelation without having to resort to context, channel and select hacks.

Compare this to Golang where this is very little tools for managing groups of goroutines. You have the sync package, specifically WaitGroup which get you some of the way there but it's still massively behind the equivalent JVM stdlib support for real concurrency. JVM has equivalents to everything in the sync package but in addition to that it for instance the collections library which contains ConcurrentHashMap, which naturally works perfectly with VirtualThreads vs Golang which map is not goroutine safe and you have to go outside the stdlib to get concurrent safe structures.

So yeah, if you are working in Java already you should checkout VirtualThread for your i/o intensive needs, especially if you were using Go for those tasks before.