Thursday, January 19, 2017

JDK 9 is Feature Complete!

Today's Mark Reinhold message JDK 9 is Feature Complete -- now it's time to ramp down announces that JDK 9's "overall feature set is, at this point, frozen." Reinhold, Chief Architect of Oracle's Java Platform Group, adds, "It's highly unlikely that any further JEPs will be targeted to the release." Text similar to that in this message is also featured on the JDK 9 page (which was not coincidentally updated today).

The JDK 9 page lists nearly ninety features, including the following subset listed here:

According to Reinhold's message and the current JDK 9 page, the JDK 9 Rampdown Phase has begun "in which we aim to fix the bugs that need to be fixed and understand why we're not going to fix some bugs that perhaps ought to be fixed."

Reinhold and the JDK 9 page state that "it is highly unlikely that any further JEPs will be targeted to the [JDK 9] release." They add the types of things that might still be added:

  • "Small enhancements to new features will be considered, but the bar is now much higher."
  • "Low-risk enhancements that add small bits of missing functionality or improve usability may be approved, especially when justified by developer feedback."
  • "Enhancements to tests or documentation do not require advance approval."

The JDK 9 page currently shows 27 July 2017 as the "General Availability" date for JDK 9.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

If it's not too late...

how about adding array slicing features, as supported by Python?

// Existing functionality
char[] array = {'R', 'o', 'b', 'e', 'r', 't'};
System.out.println(array[0]); // Prints 'R'

// Feature requests
System.out.println(array[-1]); // 't'
System.out.println(array[0:3]); // R' 'o' 'b'
System.out.println(array[:3]); // 'R' 'o' 'b'
System.out.println(array[2:]); // 'b' 'e' 'r' 't'
System.out.println(array[-6:]); // 'R' 'o' 'b' 'e' 'r' 't'
System.out.println(array[-2::-2]); // 'r' 'b' 'R'
etc.

Note: I didn't know how to add a feature request, so I added it as a comment here. Reference: http://robertjliguori.blogspot.com/2017/02/how-do-i-do-java-programming-language.html