Thursday, July 29, 2021

Chasing Java's release train, from 8 to 16. Part 3: The avalanche of releases ...

Undoubtedly, JDK-11 was an import milestone but once the dust settled, another target appeared on the horizon, JDK-17, the next LTS release. But between those, the avalanche of new releases and features was unleashed.

JDK 12

JDK-12 didn't have too many features packed into it nonetheless it includes considerable number of improvements, especially to G1 garbage collector.

Besides the changes we have talked about, JDK-12 has delivered quite a number of the security enhancements, notably:

JDK 13

Just when the excitement after JDK-12 release faded away, the JDK-13 was ready to come along. By all means, it was a minor one from the features perspective.

A fair amount of the security enhancements in JDK-13 is certainly worth checking out.

JDK 14

Going further, the JDK-14 kept the steady pace of innovation and was bundled with quite a useful set of changes. Let us take a look at the most interesting ones.

The JDK-14 was not without the security enhancements, the most disruptive of those was probably the removal of the java.security.acl APIs (see please JDK-8191138).

JDK 15

Arguably, the JDK-15 was a major one for the reasons that many experimental and preview features had finally graduated to mainstream and became ready for production use. Let us start from those.

Besides JEP-339 (EdDSA), there are quite a few security enhancements in JDK-15, the ones that deserve mentioning are:

JDK 16

If JDK-15 qualified as a major one then JDK-16 could be easily stamped as huge, packed with new language features, tooling and GC improvements. Let us dig right in.

Many security enhancements were baked into JDK-16, just to mention a couple:

JDK 17: Mostly There

Nonetheless the JDK-17 is not out yet, it has entered Rampdown Phase Two, meaning its feature set is frozen and no further JEPs will be targeted to this release. In the upcoming part we are going to cover it right when its release is announced. Stay tuned!