Have you had experience with virtual threads in Apache Kafka?

Virtual threads are not directly used in Apache Kafka, as Kafka is built on traditional threads and asynchronous mechanisms. However, with the introduction of virtual threads (Project Loom) in Java, message processing in Kafka can be improved, for example, when implementing consumers, allowing the creation of thousands of lightweight threads for parallel processing without significant overhead.

Example of using virtual threads for Kafka message processing (Java 19+):

try (var consumer = new KafkaConsumer<String, String>(props)) {
    consumer.subscribe(List.of("topic"));
    while (true) {
        var records = consumer.poll(Duration.ofMillis(100));
        for (var record : records) {
            Thread.startVirtualThread(() -> {
                // Message processing
                System.out.println(record.value());
            });
        }
    }
}

Thus, virtual threads allow writing simpler and more scalable code for Kafka message processing, but Kafka itself does not depend on them.