Oracle has announced the general availability of Java Standard Edition 13 (Java SE 13) along with the open source version, Java Development Kit 13 (JDK 13). The announcement was made at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco.
OpenWorld is held concurrently with CodeOne, and in the keynote for this Brian Goetz, Java language architect at Oracle, said the move to a six montlly schedule is working well but means new releases don't have big new features.
This lack of a big headline feature is because features are now delivered more often and in smaller pieces:
"In the old world, when we had big releases every few years and those big releases tended to have big features, there was plenty of motivation to upgrade. Now the reality is, we're not going to be seeing a lot of those big features in the future, and that's not because we're not innovating, it's because those big features are going to get broken up into smaller features and delivered in phases."
The latest release includes two preview features: Switch Expressions, which extends switch so it can be used as either a statement or an expression, and the addition of text blocks. These can be used to represent multi-line text strings without escape characters.
Other new features in Java 13 are Dynamic CDS archives, an enhancement to the z garbage collector to return unused heap memory to the operating system, and a reimplementation of the legacy Socket API. The Dynamic CDS archives extend application class-data sharing to allow the dynamic archiving of classes at the end of Java application execution. The updated legacy socket API provides a simpler and more modern implementation that is easy to maintain and debug.
Alongside Java 13, Oracle is releasing Java 13 as the Oracle OpenJDK release using the open source GNU General Public License v2, with the Classpath Exception (GPLv2+CPE).
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