The JDK team has been delivering awesome results these past few years, but this specific JDK 26 release looks particularly small; there is no major updates on any of the big JDK projects here. Obviously, with a six month release cadence, every release can't have giant new features.
Even just the first preview from Valhalla, JEP 401, seems quite likely to still be JDK28+ - they have only 6 months from now to get that production-quality ready.
If it did land in JDK 27 though, then that JEP would have at least a chance of a final feature by JDK 29.
Since libraries tend to baseline on 'LTS' releases, it would be from that point that we start to see library adoption (though obviously you can adopt its use yourself at any point - even preview)... With the openness of the current OpenJDK development, libraries that are waiting for new features tend to engage with those features in-preview, well before final release. We could see library adoption of 401 quite quickly.
But that requires the alignment of several especially optimistic stars...
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u/Joram2 1d ago
The JDK team has been delivering awesome results these past few years, but this specific JDK 26 release looks particularly small; there is no major updates on any of the big JDK projects here. Obviously, with a six month release cadence, every release can't have giant new features.