Wow – that was quick. After years of interminable delays to Java 9, all of a sudden the new strict release cycle has kicked in and the first result of that, Java 10 was released on March 20 2018.
In brief, there will be a new release of Java every 6 months from now on and every three years there will be a “long term support” release. Java 11 (due late 2018) is planned to be the first LTS. (Thanks to David Morgan in the comments for spotting my error in early versions of this post!)
Obviously many projects/organizations will insist on only using the LTS releases, so the reality for many Java developers is that adopting Java 11 will probably be long term stretch goal. (By my reckoning, if they keep their promise, Java 17 will be the next LTS after that – it will interesting psychological challenge for the likes of banks to upgrade from 11 to 17 in one jump!).
For anyone not tied to LTS releases, we’re going to get a new set of toys to play with every six months!
Here’s the full set of JEPs (JDK Enhancement Proposals) you can use right now in Java 10. Most of them are under the hood enhancements, cleanups and non-coding related changes. But the headline for Java programmers is the first of them, JEP286 – which I’ll write about in my next blog post. It’s a stunning improvement to Java.
286: Local-Variable Type Inference
296: Consolidate the JDK Forest into a Single Repository
304: Garbage-Collector Interface
307: Parallel Full GC for G1
310: Application Class-Data Sharing
312: Thread-Local Handshakes
313: Remove the Native-Header Generation Tool (javah)
314: Additional Unicode Language-Tag Extensions
316: Heap Allocation on Alternative Memory Devices
317: Experimental Java-Based JIT Compiler
319: Root Certificates
322: Time-Based Release Versioning
If I am understanding this page correctly, 9 isn’t an LTS release, but 11 will be: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/eol-135779.html
Thanks David – I’d read an older proposal from Mark Reinhold – I’ll make a correction to the post!