Java developers are set to welcome JDK 20, which has entered general availability, though there’s already talk of JDK 21 which is set to arrive in 21 months and superseded version 20 which is not considered an LTS release. The last LTS would be JDK 17 of 2021.
However, the company is keen to stress that most of the fixes and features in Java come straight from Oracle, which accounts for well over two-thirds of new additions.
Oracle compares itself favorably to other companies including Google and Amazon, though it’s worth mentioning that the interest of those companies sit with other programming languages.
Java 20 and Oracle
According to the post (opens in new tab), people working at Oracle fixed 15,420 of the 21,604 issues from Java 11 to Java 20, or 71%. This overall average sits a touch higher than when looking at Java 20 alone, for which Oracle is responsible for 69% of the fixes (or 1,595 of the 2,314).
However, other companies have made significant investments in Java, for which Oracle is seemingly grateful. A comment on the post reads:
“Oracle would like to thank the developers working for organizations including Alibaba, Amazon, ARM, Google, Huawei, IBM, Intel, ISCAS, Red Hat, SAP, and Tencent for their notable contributions.”
Later on, the company went on to name seven individuals who had provided “invaluable feedback on build quality [and] logged good quality bugs,” along with five FOSS projects that tested early access builds.
To coincide with the fact that Java 20 is not an LTS release, many of its updates are centered around fixes and tweaks.
In fact, Project Amber, Project Panama, and Project Loom all remain in preview and as such are not ready just yet.
Looking ahead, Oracle reckons that Java “continues to be the #1 programming language for today’s technology trends” and it seems to be well poised to receive support from a broad range of companies working across various industries.
