Oracle has outlined its plans to advance Java in 2024, encompassing various OpenJDK projects like Amber, which focuses on smaller, productivity-oriented features, Babylon, designed for extending Java to foreign programming models such as GPUs, and Valhalla, aiming to enhance the Java object model with value objects to eliminate long-standing performance bottlenecks.
In a video released on January 18, Oracle Java developer relations representative Nicolai Parlog shared insights into Java’s roadmap for the year. However, he cautioned that while many improvements are in progress, most of the work may not see release until 2025 or later.
Project Babylon aims to enhance code reflection, expand the reflection API, and enable the transformation of Java code within a method. This is intended to allow developers to write Java code interpretable by libraries as mathematical functions. The Babylon team plans to publish use cases like auto-differentiating, C# LINQ emulation, and GPU programming in the coming weeks.
Project Leyden, focusing on improving startup times, aims to refine the concept of condensers and work towards the production-readiness of prototype condensers in 2024. Project Amber’s preview features include string templates, a simplified main method, and statements before this() and super(). These features are expected to be finalized in 2024, with ongoing exploration of capabilities like primitive types in patterns and with expressions.
Project Valhalla concentrates on value classes and objects, providing class instances with only final instance fields and lacking object identity. This approach eliminates confusion and reduces runtime overhead for boxed primitives like Integer, Double, and Byte.
Project Lilliput, aimed at downsizing Java object headers in the HotSpot JVM and reducing Java’s memory footprint, is currently refining a fast-locking scheme. Project Panama, connecting JVM and native C code, involves ongoing work on the vector API, improving the foreign function and memory API, and constructing jextract, a tool generating Java bindings from native library headers.
Regarding Project Loom, incubating Java VM and API features, Parlog mentioned that virtual threads are final, and the structured concurrency and scoped values APIs reached their second previews in Java 22. Finalization is expected in the current year, with hopes for progress in making synchronization non-pinning and file I/O non-capturing, particularly on Linux.
Oracle has outlined its plans to advance Java in 2024, encompassing various OpenJDK projects like Amber, which focuses on smaller, productivity-oriented features, Babylon, designed for extending Java to foreign programming models such as GPUs, and Valhalla, aiming to enhance the Java object model with value objects to eliminate long-standing performance bottlenecks.
In a video released on January 18, Oracle Java developer relations representative Nicolai Parlog shared insights into Java’s roadmap for the year. However, he cautioned that while many improvements are in progress, most of the work may not see release until 2025 or later.
