Oracle has announced the general availability of Java 15 (Oracle JDK 15) — the latest version of the technology that has dominated computing throughout this century and whose development has accelerated in recent times, which has become more continuous releases of the development kit.
On this occasion, we find, once again, essential improvements and news, such as the availability for the production of the low latency garbage collector ZGC, which is expected to have a significant impact on many workloads by offering developers a strong choice when it comes to garbage collection. Another garbage collector, Shenandoah, has also become officially available for production environments.
Another interesting aspect of Java 15 is the text blocks , which are according to the Java Enhancement Proposal 378 — “A text block is a multi-line string literal that avoids the need for most escape sequences, automatically formats the string in a predictable way, and gives the developer control over the format when desired.”
By means of the Java 371 Improvement Proposal, the hidden classes have been incorporated into the version of the JDK that concerns us, which involve changes in the values returned by ‘Class :: getName‘, ‘Class :: descriptorString‘, ‘MethodType :: descriptorString‘ and ‘Class :: getNestMembers‘, plus the Java virtual machine nestmate test has been changed to only throw ‘IllegalAccessError‘ when the Nest membership is invalid.
But not everything was going to be additions in Java 15, since the JDK ports for Solaris over SARC have been removed, the Nashorn JavaScript engine removed, disabled and marked as obsolete the partial lock and marked as obsolete Remote Method Invocation (RMI).
On the other hand, support for “cryptographic signatures using the Edwards-Curve digital signature algorithm (EdDSA)” has been implemented, and the sealed classes have arrived in a preliminary phase.
Those who want to know all the details of JDK 15 can consult the release notes, the corresponding entry on the OpenJDK website, and the official documentation.