Oracle JDK 21 LTS Release: More Features from Loom, Panama, and Generational ZGC

Java 21 has arrived, and with it the latest implementation of Oracle's Java Development Kit (JDK). Oracle JDK 21 is a long-term support release (LTS) focused on serious performance improvements, stability enhancements, and security upgrades.

As an LTS release, JDK 21 will receive eight years of support from Oracle. The company also announced that it will provide support for Java 11 through "at least" January 2032. The eight-year extension was a response to "customer feedback in the Java ecosystem," said Sharat Chander, Director of Java SE Product Management at Oracle, in a blog post.

This release implements capabilities from four ongoing OpenJDK efforts, including Project Amber (String Templates, Record Patterns, Pattern Matching for Switch, Unnamed Patterns and Variables, and Unnamed Classes and Instance Main Methods); Project Panama (Foreign Function & Memory API and Vector API); Project Loom (Virtual Threads, Scoped Values, and Structured Concurrency); and Generational ZGC (improved app performance by extending Z Garbage Collection). The release also comes with maintenance and deprecation features (Deprecate the 32-bit x86 Port for Removal, and Prepare to Disallow the Dynamic Loading of Agents).

This is the 12th Feature Release delivered through the six-month release cadence proposed by Mark Reinhold, chief architect of Oracle’s Java Platform Group, back in 2017. " This level of predictability allows developers to easily manage their adoption of innovation thanks to a steady stream of expected improvements," Chander noted in his post.

Oracle announced the release at the Oracle Cloud World  conference in Las Vegas.

"Java continues to be the language and platform of choice for the development of robust, scalable, and secure applications used by organizations and millions of individuals around the world," said Georges Saab, senior vice president of Oracle Java Platform and chair of the OpenJDK governing board, in a statement. "The new enhancements in Java 21 enable developers to build better applications even faster than before. In addition, commercial support will be available for at least eight years to enable customers to migrate at their own pace."

In virtually all of its announcements, blog posts, and press releases, Oracle calls Java "the world’s number one programming language and development platform." And there's a reason for that, according to Stephen O’Grady, principal analyst and co-founder of the developer-focused analyst firm RedMonk.

"Despite so many languages that are in circulation, Java is still everywhere today," O'Grady said in a statement. "As the world evolves, Java’s ability to adapt will help it continue to play a key role in offering value to developers."

This release implements 15 JEPs (JDK Enhancement Proposals), which, as most ADTmag readers know, are similar to JSRs (Java Specification Requests), the formal spec requests of the Java Community Process (JSR). JEPs allow OpenJDK committers contributing to the free and open-source implementation of the Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE), to work more informally. As Oracle puts it, "The Java 21 release is the result of extensive collaboration between Oracle engineers and other members of the worldwide Java developer community via OpenJDK and the Java Community Process."

The following is available on Oracle's website, but I'm listing what I consider to be the most significant JEPs in this release here for our readers' convenience:

Project Loom Features

• JEP 444: Virtual Threads: Significantly streamlines the process of writing, maintaining, and observing high-throughput, concurrent applications by introducing lightweight virtual threads to the Java Platform. By enabling developers to easily troubleshoot, debug, and profile concurrent applications and scale them with existing JDK tools and techniques, virtual threads help accelerate application development.

• JEP 446: Scoped Values (Preview): Enables the sharing of immutable data within and across threads. This helps increase the ease-of-use, comprehensibility, robustness, and performance of developers’ projects.

• JEP 453: Structured Concurrency (Preview): Simplifies concurrent programming by introducing an API for structured concurrency, which helps promote a style of concurrent programming that can eliminate common risks arising from cancellation and shutdown – such as thread leaks and cancellation delays – and improves the observability of concurrent code. This helps developers streamline error handling and cancellation, improve reliability, and enhance observability.

Performance Updates

• JEP 439: Generational ZGC: Improves application performance by extending the Z Garbage Collector (ZGC) to maintain separate generations for young and old objects. Generational ZGC helps improve developer productivity by lowering the overhead of required heap memory and garbage collection CPU for applications, as well as reducing the risks of allocation stalls.

Language Updates and Improvements

• JEP 430: String Templates (Preview): Simplifies the development of Java programs by making it easy to express strings that include values computed at run time, and improves the security of programs that compose strings from user-provided values and pass them to other systems. In addition, the readability of expressions that mix text and expressions is enhanced, and non-string values computed from literal text and embedded expressions can be created without having to transit through an intermediate string representation. This helps increase developer productivity by making the Java language more readable, writable, and maintainable.

• JEP 440: Record Patterns (Third Preview): Enhances the Java language by extending pattern matching to de-structure instances of record classes, as well as enabling the addition of nested patterns. This enables developers to extend pattern matching to more sophisticated and composable data queries, which helps increase productivity.

• JEP 441: Pattern Matching for Switch: Expands the expressiveness and applicability of switch expressions and statements by allowing patterns to appear in case labels. In addition, the safety of switch statements is increased by requiring that pattern switch statements cover all possible input values, and all existing switch expressions and statements can continue to be compiled with no changes and executed with identical semantics. This helps developers streamline and increase the reliability of their projects by making the Java language more semantic so that complex data-oriented queries can be expressed concisely and safely.

• JEP 443: Unnamed Patterns and Variables (Preview): Enhances the Java language by enabling unnamed patterns to match a record component without stating the component's name or type, as well as unnamed variables that can be initialized but not used. This helps simplify the development process by increasing the readability of record patterns and improving the maintainability of all code.

• JEP 445: Unnamed Classes and Instance Main Methods (Preview): Helps simplify and improve the accessibility of the Java language so that educators can introduce programming concepts in a gradual manner. By avoiding the introduction of a separate beginner’s dialect of Java and a separate beginner’s toolchain, student programs can be compiled and run with the same tools that compile and run any Java program—helping students write basic programs in a concise manner and grow their code gracefully as their skills increase. This helps improve student developer productivity by enabling them to write their first programs without needing to understand language features designed for large programs.

Project Panama Preview Features

• JEP 442: Foreign Function & Memory API (Third Preview): Introduces an API to enable Java programs to interoperate with code and data outside of the Java runtime. By efficiently invoking foreign functions (i.e., code outside the Java Virtual Machine [JVM]), and by safely accessing foreign memory (i.e., memory not managed by the JVM), the new API enables Java programs to call native libraries and process native data without requiring the Java Native Interface. This increases ease-of-use, flexibility, performance, and safety for developers.

• JEP 448: Vector API (Sixth Incubator): Introduces an API to express vector computations that reliably compile at runtime to vector instructions on supported CPU architectures. This helps developers improve the performance of their projects by providing them with access to an API that is capable of clearly and concisely expressing a wide range of vector computations.

In addition to the new enhancements, Java 21 is supported by Java Management Service (JMS), an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) native service, which was created to provide a unified console and dashboard to help organizations manage Java runtimes and applications on-premises or on any cloud.

And it's also worth noting that Oracle is extending. Dev.java, it's official site for Java developers, to include the Java Playground, an online sandbox designed to allows users to type and run small Java code snippets without the need for a local runtime or IDE. Developers can try out new features from Java 21 on the Playground immediately, the company said, all from a browser powered by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

Posted by John K. Waters on September 27, 2023