The Infoq Podcast

On this week’s podcast, Wes Reisz talks with Brian Goetz. Brian is the Java Language Architect at Oracle. The two start with a discussion on what the six-month cadence has meant to the teams developing Java. Then move to a review of the features in Java 9 through 12. Finally, the two discuss the longer-term side projects (such as Amber, Loom, and Valhalla) and their role in the larger release process for the JDK. * The JVM’s sixth-month cadence changed the way the JDK is delivered and planned. While it definitely provides more rapid delivery at expected intervals, the release train approach turned out to also improve flexibility and efficiency. * Oracle JDK and OpenJDK are almost identical. Most of the JDK distributions are forks from OpenJDK with different bug fixes and backports applied. So the difference between the distributions now is largely which bug fixes are picked up. * Local Variable inference (which was released as part of Java 10) illustrated the tension on making changes to the language. Many p