Preview Feature — Requires --enable-preview at compile and runtime. The ThreadLocal Problem at Scale ThreadLocal has been the standard way to pass context (request ID, user session, database transaction) implicitly through a call stack without threading it through every method signature. It works well with a few hundred platform threads. With virtual threads, it breaks down. Problem 1 — Memory overhead with inheritance When you create a child thread with InheritableThreadLocal, Java copies the thread-local map from parent to child: