Today, Java 21 has reached General Availability (GA) with some important new features in the language mainstream (i.e., not requiring preview flags enabled), and Oracle will be supporting Java 21 as a Long long-term support (guaranteed at least 3years of free support (2years to the next LTS + 1 yr overlap) and then for at least an additional 5 years under support subscription). Everyone is talking about virtual threads. Interestingly the new virtual threads mean, in the majority of cases, we no longer need to handle the complexities of reactive programming – not my point of view, but a view expressed earlier today by Tomas Langer, the architect for Helidon. For old hands like myself – this is a blessing as the old-style threading comes more naturally. There are a lot of other smaller features coming through in the language with this, such as records, Z Garbage Collector, and better support for Key Encapsulation management. All the fine details can be found on the Oracle Java blog.

Java.dev has a new Playground, which allows you to write some Java code in the browser and run it. No local JDK or IDE is needed. Great for trying out code, like pattern matching for switch statements.

GraalVM gets a new release with Java 21. Along with some other cool features. Including being able to deploy Graal’s polyglot features with just the support for the languages you want, meaning that the GraalVM footprint is kept as small as you need in containers. This decoupling is supported with Maven and Gradle configurations. With this are enhancements for the Just-in-Time (JIT) and Ahead-of-Time (AOT) performance – read more about this in Alina Yurenko‘s blog.