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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

Note all the new cool stuff is incubator and preview status and I'm a little worried that this will still be the case for the JDK 21 stable release.

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I have hopes to see Virtual Threads in Java 21, also being the next LTS.

I think this is supposed to be the last preview version of FFI and the other JEPs from Project Panama, so hopefully we will have them at least but I definitely share a bit of that concern.

Probably not this go-around: https://openjdk.org/jeps/442

Better to be right then rushed though.

IIRC they are going to release pattern matching for switch and record deconstruction as stable in JDK 21.

I really hope to see the SIMD vector related improvements come through, I know there are some independent JDK code bases that have more evolved SIMD support, but for a lot of big data processing tools, switching away from jdk based languages appears to be the way SIMD related performance improvements have been realized because of this missing crucial feature set. JDK 11 was when this stuff was first in development, and it's truthfully insane that it hasn't fully been released yet.

Most of these low-level APIs simply just wait for value types - they don’t want to hardcode something into the language, that might not be a perfect fit for those. Which makes sense, frankly.

Within limits. Valhalla seems to be still far from launching, and allowing features to back up behind it might just recreate the situation Java has previously found itself in during the 7/8 era where slippage in massive projects caused everything else to slip too. The new release cycle was meant to fix that, but if half the new stuff ends up waiting for value types then the problem has just reappeared in a new form.

The odd thing is that part of Valhalla is about how to migrate existing types to being value types, and they already have code that can simulate the same restrictions. So it's not really clear why these features have to wait. Migration is a part of the Valhalla plan anyway.

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