Java 14 Reaches General Availability With Garbage Collection Improvements

[Chugworth]

Java 14 Reaches General Availability With Garbage Collection Improvements

Maybe they'll be good enough for it to collect itself this time.

[royce]

What about Wayland support in Java? Any news?

I would also like to know. GUI apps work like arse in Wayland.

[TemplarGR]

Maybe they'll be good enough for it to collect itself this time.

Careful you will bleed to death with all that edge....

[andrebrait]

A rather weak release, with barely a useful feature. But since it's LTS, they probably decided to play it safe. Then again, why add features in preview form to an LTS release?

14 is not LTS.
The next LTS is 17.

[Britoid]

What about Wayland support in Java? Any news?

Entirely depends on the GUI toolkit being used. SWT supports Wayland, other toolkits may vary.

[Delgarde]

Also multiline strings and better NullPointerException messages. Good release, I don't need anything revolutionary tbh.

As I understand it, multiline strings are still a preview feature... not enabled by default yet, though I think the form is expected to be pretty much final by now.

The two I'm happiest about in this release are having useful messages in NullPointerException (because "null" certainly wasn't a useful message), and switch expressions. The latter aren't vital, as such, but they're a very expressive way of dealing with certain common cases.

Looking forward to pattern matching in 15, though I hope they change the syntax to copy the Kotlin style... I don't like the current form where you have to assign the cast object a new name within the checked block, rather than the compiler being smart enough to automatically inject casts where provably safe.

[Guest]

#MakeJavaGreatAgain

If it doesn't have native support for AoT compilation into binary depending only on libc, then it's not great, still,...

However, golang wins (lots of) the market, if it brings generics/contracts/templates/... sooner than Java brings native AoT support,...

I'm working on a hobby project in golang, and cold start is literally with 2 seconds (tidy/cleanup jobs are launched in background), and memory usage of docker container after start is ~15MB,... With tens of simultaneous connections RAM usage is under 50MB,... And, if golang brings generics support, then I won't miss anything from Java world,...

[bug77]

Java changed how it's doing it's releases to be more time-based (starting with Java 9). They realized that by making giant feature packed releases that came out every 5 years, they were actually holding back features that were ready early on in the release cycle. So they are now having more frequent, less feature-packed releases. This is a good thing. I'm pretty sure the fact that this is an LTS is coincidental, it's just the nature of how they're doing releases now.

I think the preview form of things is also a side-effect of the release schedule.

Yes, I know all that. I was saying it's weak release even with this new release cycle. I mean, there are interesting feature in the making, but none of them is in this release.

Also, every 3rd release is LTS. That makes both 14 and 17 LTS 14 was not marked as such during development, for some reason the LTS designation comes only after release.

[Delgarde]

Also, every 3rd release is LTS. That makes both 14 and 17 LTS 14 was not marked as such during development, for some reason the LTS designation comes only after release.

Nope. I was under the same impression, and it may be that this was their original plan for the new versioning scheme. But no, Java 14 is not an LTS version... the next one of those isn't until Java 17, due September next year.

Edit: the statement from OpenJDK is "every three years, one feature release will be designated as the Long Term Supported (LTS) release." So that might be the misunderstanding... it's not every 3rd release, it's one every 3 years (so more like every 6th release, which fits the jump from 11 to 17).

[bug77]

Nope. I was under the same impression, and it may be that this was their original plan for the new versioning scheme. But no, Java 14 is not an LTS version... the next one of those isn't until Java 17, due September next year.

Edit: the statement from OpenJDK is "every three years, one feature release will be designated as the Long Term Supported (LTS) release." So that might be the misunderstanding... it's not every 3rd release, it's one every 3 years (so more like every 6th release, which fits the jump from 11 to 17).

Aw f*ck, when did that happen? Thanks for setting me straight.

Guest I'm with you, Java AoT will not be with us anytime soon. And I also like Go better. Some of the things Go didn't implement (or enforces by default) actually force me to rethink some of the (bad) practices I picked up during my years with Java. Java still pays the bills, tho