JDK 7 delayed again... how bad is that?

Mark Reinhold announced today that the JDK 7 / JavaSE 7 project has slipped once again: mid-2011 without Jigsaws and Lambdas, late 2012 for JavaSE 8 with those. The delay (or some other bad news like dropping features) was already expected by anyone who tracks the project. But really, how big and bad is this delay? As a big enthusiast of both Jigsaw and Lambdas - and as a tech writer who just published two massive articles on Java 7 & JavaSE 7 (in the Brazilian Java Magazine) - I was initially... very unsatisfied, to be polite. But doing a reality check, the slip is neither as big, nor as bad as it seems at first sight. The reason of course, is JDK 6. I have continuously tracking the "post-6uN" releases, where Sun/Oracle continues to push the envelope, delivering as much improvements as they can without breaking their own TCK. See my recent coverage of 6u21 for example. I'm already testing the first build of 6u23, that (besides a bunch of Swing fixes) carries another massive VM update, now to the bleeding-edge HotSpot 19 (the very latest one from JDK 7 at the moment). This includes such high-profile JDK 7 features as the latest G1 collector, the complete VM support for JSR-292, and other items like CompressedOops with 64 Gb heaps, CMS fixes and tons of smaller VM/runtime fixes and improvements. Version numbers are a somewhat arbitrary thing. Sun changed the J2SEJavaSE versioning schema a few times, always to the dislike of...

Date: September, 08 2010
Url: http://www.java.net/blog/opinali/archive/2010/09/08/jdk-7-delayed-again-how-bad

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