Java 8 release shifted to March 2014

The chief architect of the Java platform, Mark Reinhold, today announced in his blog that the release of Java 8 has moved from September of this year to March of the next. Recently, a lot of Oracle engineers have been deployed to make the Java platform more secure. People were taken not from nowhere, but were transferred from other features, in particular, from lambda. Therefore, the process of developing new features in Java 8 recently went slower than expected, and the release date left for six months.

Mark asks the question: what were the options for the guys from Oracle? First, you could just throw out the lambda from the release. In this case, the release time should have been enough, but the lambda went somewhere around 2016, which is not very good. The second option is to release the neutered in places, in some places untested and on the whole damp lambda and get a pack of possible rakes. Plus, in both of these variants, there is not very much time for fixing security-bugs, which Oracle has recently paid heightened attention to. The third option, on which the guys from Oracle stopped, is to move the release for half a year. This will allow, firstly, to better test new features (first of all, lambda) and collect more feedback from users, and secondly, to make Java more secure by closing a number of potential vulnerabilities during this time.

Surely something more detailed on the topic of postponing the release to March 2014 we will hear this coming Tuesday in Moscow at the JavaOne Russia 2013 conference . If you have any questions about the transfer of the release - ask them in the comments to this post, we with other Oracle engineers will try to answer them.