Java 9 will be postponed for half a year

There is such a big and important person in modern Java - Mark Reinhold . For those who do not know, this is the architect of the Java platform, that is, in Java, the most important technical person. There are other architects in Java (for example, Brian Goetz is the architect of the language, and John Rose is the architect of the virtual machine), but Mark is the Most Important Architect.



So, just a couple of days ago, Mark in the OpenJDK's mailing list jdk9-dev published a letter about the proposed postponement of the release date of Java 9 / JDK 9 from September 2016 to March 2017.

The main points are:

• Jigsaw (modules) is a key subproject of Java 9. It is very important and very large.
• Java platform developers have made great strides in its implementation
• According to the current schedule , an important mailstone, Feature Complete, to which all features together with the corresponding unit tests should be integrated into the main repository, should take place in a week, on December 10.
• but Jigsaw requires more time and the developers did not have time by December 10. It takes more time to get feedback from users of early builds.
• As a result, Mark requests a rescheduling from the community. Feature Complete, he proposes to move by five and a half months: from December 10, 2015 to May 25, 2016. And General Availability (GA), that is, the date of the final release, from September 22, 2016 to March 23, 2017 .

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Why I’m sure that Mark’s request will be satisfied by the community:

• He has a good argument. Better quality feature than poor quality
• He has a huge weight in the community and in the Java Organization in Oracle. Still, the main architect.
• Jigsaw, unlike lambda, is needed by no means everyone. In the community, there is still no consensus about how much it is worth bothering with modularity. Some (not without reason) believe that Compact Profiles is quite enough from the point of view of minimizing disk space, and paying such a price (for so many years and so many people, constant delays) for encapsulation and other jigsaw buns is really overkill.

In principle, after the story with the repeated transfer of Java 7 and the transfer of Java 8, there was no surprise in the current Mark request for transfer. So the story repeats. We are waiting for the next post about the train blog Mark .

Why train? Mark loves this metaphor and constantly uses it in his blog. Then he writes about the fact that some feature (aka Jigsaw) does not have time for a train called “Java 8 ″. Then he writes about the fact that the release of Java is like a speeding train and that it cannot be stopped for a second (and therefore we will not abruptly interrupt the development right now, but take another six months to finish everything neatly reducing the speed, that is, we will slow down the train not urgently, but measuredly).



Previous trains about Java 8 and Jigsaw: one , two , three .

Such are the trains of the case.