Saturday, May 29, 2021

Chasing Java's release train, from 8 to 16. Part 2: The race to the next LTS release.

In the first part we thoroughly went through the massive amount of features delivered in scope of JDK-9. Nevertheless, this release was always considered as being transitional, with little or no adoption expected. It has a mission to kick off the race towards next LTS release, JDK-11.

JDK 10

JDK-10, the first release followed the six months cadence cycle, brought a number of new features into the language and JVM itself. Let us take a look at the most interesting ones from the developer's perspective.

Undoubtedly, JDK-10 release has quite moderate amount of features comparing to JDK-9, but every one of those was delivered much faster, thanks to the new release cycle.

JDK 11

The first LTS release of the JDK following the new schedule, JDK-11, had seen the light in 2018, six month after JDK-10 release. It finally brought a long awaited stability and established a new baseline in post JDK-9 world. It also included a number of features.

It worth to note that JDK-11 had introduced two new garbage collectors, ZGC and Epsilon, both were marked as experimental. We are going to get back to those in the upcoming posts while discussing more recent JDK releases.

So, where are we today? The JDK-11 slowly but steadily getting more adoption as more and more projects migrate off the JDK-8. Nonetheless, the majority are still on JDK-8 and in my opinion, there are no reasons to expect drastic changes of the balance within next couple of years. But this is another story ...

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