Java 16 / JDK 16: General Availability

[mark.reinhold at oracle.com]

JDK 16, the reference implementation of Java 16, is now Generally
Available.  We’ve identified no P1 bugs since we promoted build 36
over five weeks ago so that’s the official GA release, ready for
production use.

GPL-licensed OpenJDK builds from Oracle are available here:

  https://jdk.java.net/16

Builds from other implementors will no doubt be available soon.

This release includes seventeen features [1]:

  338: Vector API (Incubator)
  347: Enable C++14 Language Features
  357: Migrate from Mercurial to Git
  369: Migrate to GitHub
  376: ZGC: Concurrent Thread-Stack Processing
  380: Unix-Domain Socket Channels
  386: Alpine Linux Port
  387: Elastic Metaspace
  388: Windows/AArch64 Port
  389: Foreign Linker API (Incubator)
  390: Warnings for Value-Based Classes
  392: Packaging Tool
  393: Foreign-Memory Access API (Third Incubator)
  394: Pattern Matching for instanceof
  395: Records
  396: Strongly Encapsulate JDK Internals by Default
  397: Sealed Classes (Second Preview)

along with, as usual, hundreds of smaller enhancements and thousands
of bug fixes.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to JDK 16, whether by creating
features or enhancements, fixing bugs, or downloading and testing
the early-access builds!

- Mark


[1] https://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk/16