What’s New in JDK 16? 8 Key Feature Proposals You Should Know

With the release of JDK 15, the upcoming JDK 16 brings eight official feature proposals slated for March next year.

Move ZGC (Z Garbage Collector) thread‑stack processing from safepoints to the concurrent phase, aiming to remove thread‑stack handling from ZGC safepoints.

Flexible metaspace capability, allowing unused HotSpot VM class metadata memory to be returned to the operating system more quickly, reducing metaspace usage and simplifying code maintenance.

Enable C++14 language features, permitting the use of C++14 constructs in JDK C++ source code.

Incubator vector API, introducing the jdk.incubator.vector module to express vector computations that compile to optimal hardware instructions on supported CPU architectures, delivering performance superior to equivalent scalar code.

Port JDK to Windows/AArch64 platforms.

Port JDK to Alpine Linux and other Linux distributions that use musl as the primary C library on x64 and AArch64 architectures.

Migrate the OpenJDK source repository from Mercurial to Git.

Move the OpenJDK project to GitHub, reflecting the migration from Mercurial to Git.

Note: Like JDK 15, JDK 16 is a non‑LTS release with only six months of support. The next LTS version, JDK 17, is planned for September 2021, three years after JDK 11. However, surveys show most Java developers are still on JDK 8.

References

JDK 16: What’s coming in Java 16

https://www.oschina.net/news/119099/new-features-in-jdk16