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Main Authors: Bugayenko, Yegor, Trunnikov, Maxim, Zakharov, Vladimir
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.02691
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author Bugayenko, Yegor
Trunnikov, Maxim
Zakharov, Vladimir
author_facet Bugayenko, Yegor
Trunnikov, Maxim
Zakharov, Vladimir
contents The Java Stream API, introduced in Java 8, makes data processing more expressive and concise compared to imperative loops. However, this abstraction can come with significant performance overhead, often due to the creation of multiple intermediate objects during pipeline execution. In functional languages such as Haskell, this problem is addressed through stream fusion, a compile-time optimization that eliminates unnecessary intermediate structures. Inspired by this idea, Streamliner was the first tool to perform ahead-of-time, bytecode-to-bytecode stream optimization for Java by unrolling stream pipelines into imperative loops. In this paper, we introduce an open-source optimizer that takes a different approach. Instead of unrolling streams into loops, it merges consecutive map() and filter() operations into a single mapMulti() call, available since Java 16. Our method avoids several limitations of Streamliner, including its sensitivity to escaping objects in lambda expressions and its restrictions on assigning or passing streams as variables. We evaluated our optimizer on nine benchmarks and observed superior performance in two cases and comparable results in most others. We also applied it to the bytecode of Apache Kafka, successfully executing all 31,799 unit tests without failures.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_02691
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Compile-Time Java Stream Fusion via mapMulti
Bugayenko, Yegor
Trunnikov, Maxim
Zakharov, Vladimir
Programming Languages
The Java Stream API, introduced in Java 8, makes data processing more expressive and concise compared to imperative loops. However, this abstraction can come with significant performance overhead, often due to the creation of multiple intermediate objects during pipeline execution. In functional languages such as Haskell, this problem is addressed through stream fusion, a compile-time optimization that eliminates unnecessary intermediate structures. Inspired by this idea, Streamliner was the first tool to perform ahead-of-time, bytecode-to-bytecode stream optimization for Java by unrolling stream pipelines into imperative loops. In this paper, we introduce an open-source optimizer that takes a different approach. Instead of unrolling streams into loops, it merges consecutive map() and filter() operations into a single mapMulti() call, available since Java 16. Our method avoids several limitations of Streamliner, including its sensitivity to escaping objects in lambda expressions and its restrictions on assigning or passing streams as variables. We evaluated our optimizer on nine benchmarks and observed superior performance in two cases and comparable results in most others. We also applied it to the bytecode of Apache Kafka, successfully executing all 31,799 unit tests without failures.
title Compile-Time Java Stream Fusion via mapMulti
topic Programming Languages
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.02691