Scoped Values, part of Project Loom, appear in the JDK for the first time as an “incubator”, the earliest stage for a major new feature.The changes to the Oracle licenses forced us to look for other JDK vendors. Pattern matching (Project Amber) also has an updated preview.

The big features that developers are waiting for, such as virtual threads (Project Loom), or a replacement for JNI Java Native Interface (Project Panama), are not yet final. One reason for the focus on fixes might be that there is not much new in JDK 20, unless you count updated previews. Fixed by company in JDK 20 (image from OpenJDK on Twitter) It is a somewhat crude measure, as multiple individuals from different organizations may contribute to an issue but shows if nothing else that Oracle is committing plenty of resources to Java, which it describes as the “#1 programming language for today’s technology trends.” That may be an exaggeration, since most surveys put it behind JavaScript and Python in usage, but if the context is enterprise applications it remains hugely significant. In the JDK 20 stats, independents are slightly ahead of Red Hat, with SAP still in fourth place. The next biggest contributor since 2018 is Red Hat, according to the stats, followed by independent individuals, and then SAP. In the case of JDK 20, 1,595 of 2,314 issues were completed by Oracle, which is approaching 69%. “Of the 21,604 JIRA issues marked as fixed in Java 11 through Java 20 at the time of their GA, 15,420 were completed by people working for Oracle while 6,184 were contributed by individual developers and developers working for other organizations,” the company said. Oracle has released Java 20, and says that since Java 11 in 2018 it has contributed over 70% of the fixes and features, measured by issues in the JIRA issue tracking system.

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