Highlights:

  • During the past five years, Oracle has organized a systematic distribution of new Java releases on a six-month cadence, and it claims to be the project’s leading contributor.
  • The Java development division comprises six projects that focus on various performance and feature aspects.

Recently, Oracle Inc. announced that Java 20, the most recent version of the well-liked programming language and development environment, is now available.

Thousands of performance, stability, and security improvements have been made in the language’s most recent version, including seven proposals to improve the Java Development Kit to boost developer productivity and enhance performance, stability, and security. The language has been around for 27 years.

During the past five years, Oracle has organized a systematic distribution of new Java releases on a six-month cadence, and it claims to be the project’s leading contributor. According to Tiobe Software BV, Java is the world’s third most used programming language, while Oracle claims that Java is the best language for organizational development.

Chad Arimura, Vice President of developer relations at Oracle, said, “The innovation pipeline has never been richer. The problem space is changing, and developers have higher demands on their programming languages than ever.”

Divided into Six Projects

The Java development division comprises six projects that focus on various performance and feature aspects. The project delivering new features most frequently is called Amber. According to Arimura, the language is continuously improving to become clearer and less prone to mistakes. It also catalyzes the ongoing transition to more data-oriented programming practices.

Enhancing startup and performance is the focus of Leyden. Loom aims to achieve massive parallelism without the requirement for asynchronous programming. Using Panama, Java native code can communicate with external libraries.

Valhalla, a long-term project, uses value types to increase memory density and improve performance in machine learning and data-intensive applications. With minimal pauses, the Z Garbage Collector aims to collect waste from big heaps.

Staged Previews

A preview system was recently implemented to gather feedback before incorporating new features into the Java standard. Previews last six months, but if there are a lot of comments, more cycles might be added. For instance, pattern matching for a switch is in its fourth preview in this edition. It allows an expression to be checked against various patterns, enabling sophisticated data-oriented queries to be represented succinctly and reliably.

Users can now nest record patterns and type patterns for declarative and composable data processing, which is a significant improvement. For increased usability, robustness, and speed, scoped values, which is still at the incubation stage, allow the use of immutable data within and between threads.

Virtual threads simplify the process of building, maintaining, and watching high-throughput concurrent applications by allowing developers to diagnose more easily, debug, and profile concurrent programs using the JDK’s existing tools and methodologies. Programming with many threads is made more accessible by structured concurrency, which treats each task that runs in a different thread as a separate unit of work.

By effectively calling foreign functions and securely gaining access to memory not controlled by the JVM, the Panama project’s foreign function and memory application program interface enables Java programs to collaborate with the code and data outside Java runtime. A new feature of the vector API boosts performance by describing vector computations that consistently compile to vector instructions on supported processors at runtime.

Oracle provides commercial Java versions for both on-premises and on the cloud, even though Java itself is open source. A single view of Java runtimes and applications used both on-premises and on any cloud is provided by the Java Management Service, a native service on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. A pay-as-you-go option, the Oracle Java Universal SE Subscription offers support, access to advanced capabilities, and complimentary applications.