JDK 16

JDK 16 is the open-source reference implementation of version 16 of the Java SE Platform, as specified by by JSR 390 in the Java Community Process.

JDK 16 reached General Availability on 16 March 2021. Production-ready binaries under the GPL are available from Oracle; binaries from other vendors will follow shortly.

The features and schedule of this release were proposed and tracked via the JEP Process, as amended by the JEP 2.0 proposal. The release was produced using the JDK Release Process (JEP 3).

Features

338: Vector API (Incubator)
347: Enable C++14 Language Features
357: Migrate from Mercurial to Git
369: Migrate to GitHub
376: ZGC: Concurrent Thread-Stack Processing
380: Unix-Domain Socket Channels
386: Alpine Linux Port
387: Elastic Metaspace
388: Windows/AArch64 Port
389: Foreign Linker API (Incubator)
390: Warnings for Value-Based Classes
392: Packaging Tool
393: Foreign-Memory Access API (Third Incubator)
394: Pattern Matching for instanceof
395: Records
396: Strongly Encapsulate JDK Internals by Default
397: Sealed Classes (Second Preview)

Schedule

2020/12/10 Rampdown Phase One (fork from main line)
2021/01/14 Rampdown Phase Two
2021/02/04 Initial Release Candidate
2021/02/18 Final Release Candidate
2021/03/16 General Availability
Last update: 2021/3/16 01:16 UTC