Java developers welcome JDK 20, which is generally available, although there is already talk of JDK 21, which will be released in 21 months and replace version 20, which is not considered an LTS release. The last LTS would be JDK 17 of 2021.
However, the company emphasizes that most fixes and features in Java come directly from Oracle, which accounts for more than two-thirds of new additions.
Oracle compares favorably to other companies, including Google and Amazon, although it’s worth noting that those companies’ interest lies in other programming languages.
Java 20 and Oracle
According to the after (opens in new tab), people who worked at Oracle solved 15,420 of the 21,604 problems from Java 11 to Java 20, or 71%. This overall average is slightly higher than looking at Java 20 alone, for which Oracle is responsible for 69% of fixes (or 1,595 of 2,314).
However, other companies have made significant investments in Java, for which Oracle is seemingly grateful. A response to the post reads:
“Oracle would like to thank the developers who work for organizations such as Alibaba, Amazon, ARM, Google, Huawei, IBM, Intel, ISCAS, Red Hat, SAP and Tencent for their remarkable contributions.”
The company later named seven individuals who provided “invaluable feedback on build quality [and] logged good quality bugs,” along with five FOSS projects that tested early access builds.
To coincide with Java 20 not being an LTS release, many of the updates focus on fixes and tweaks.
In fact, Project Amber, Project Panama, and Project Loom all remain in preview and as such are not yet ready.
Going forward, Oracle believes that Java “remains the No. 1 programming language for current technology trends” and appears well prepared to receive support from a wide variety of companies across a variety of industries.
