Accelerating the JDK release cadence

[mark.reinhold at oracle.com]

2017/9/6 9:00:36 -0700, martijnverburg at gmail.com:
> Hi Mark,
> 
> This is really welcome news, I suspect you're going to have a very happy X
> Million developers (the twitter storm is already glowing with positive
> reaction)!
> 
> Like Mario I'm also curious about how the release numbering will work.  The
> change to semver in Java 9 was welcome, but did require some tooling
> changes.

Yes, it did, and it's an unfortunate accident of timing that we're so
soon contemplating another change in the version-string scheme, but there
it is.

There's definitely some risk here, but to the extent that people took (or
will soon take) the opportunity with JDK 9 to start using the new API
(`java.lang.Runtime.Version` [1]) to compare version strings then they'll
find it easier to adapt to this next change.

> As for the open sourcing of items like JFR and Mission Control - that's
> going to be a huge boost to the ecosystem in terms of debug and performance
> tuning not to mention everything else, so thank you (and to the other
> Oracle folks who helped make this decision)!

You're welcome!

- Mark


[1] http://download.java.net/java/jdk9/docs/api/java/lang/Runtime.Version.html