There’s so much more to Java 9 than modules and a REPL. If you take a peek under the hood, you will discover that there is in fact an awful lot to be excited about, especially in the realm of performance. Major improvements to Strings, great new concurrency features, ahead-of-time compilation, compiler control, and nifty low-level ways for library writers to manipulate variables and weave up new code at run-time, make it hard for your applications not to run run faster in Java 9. In this talk we will take an in-depth look at some of these features, and take them for a spin using JMH.