The release manager for JDK 8 says Oracle will keep to the JDK 8 schedule and will ship on March 18, even if it still has ‘non-showstopper bugs’.

If you have been following the progress of JDK8 you will know that it has slipped its original schedule several times - we first talked of it shipping in late 2012, then it was set to appear in September 2013 and the latest date we provided was March 3, 2014.

Now Mathias Axelsson, Oracle JDK 8 release manager, has posted to the OpenJDK Java mailing list that:

“At this stage only showstoppers (P1) are being considered for fixing in the initial JDK 8 release. Non-showstopper bugs will be deferred to a later release in order to ensure we keep to the JDK 8 schedule and can ship on March 18.”

Alexsson said Oracle has a few fixes that are pending integration but:

“overall things are looking very good and we're on-track to have the release candidate built before the January 23 deadline.”

If you are using the developer preview that was initially released last June will find that, while the January 16 build will appear as per the build schedule, from that point onwards builds will only be made on demand based on what fixes have gone in. Axelsson says Oracle is making this adjustment to keep the turnaround time as short as possible “if we have to take a fix and respin”.

The decision to ship JDK 8 even if not bug-free may partially be down to the fact it has already been delayed from its original planned ship date because of the need to include the features from Project Lambda, which are needed for several platform goals, including the support for lambda expressions and virtual extension methods. Lambda expressions open up possibilities for improved multicore support by enabling internal iteration idioms.

Project Jigsaw, which was also originally planned for inclusion in JDK 8 and which would have added support for modularity, was postponed until Java SE 9 back in July 2012.

A buggy release wouldn’t be unknown for Java – Java SE7 had problems when it was initially released in 2011, and Java SE is part of a large Critical Patch Update announced by Oracle this week. There are 36 patches for Java SE in the update.

The most recent preview version is available from the JDK 8 Home page.

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