The Arrival of Java 20

March 21, 2023 | 10 minute read
Sharat Chander
Director, Java SE Product Management
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Oracle is proud to announce the general availability of JDK 20. This release is the 11th Feature Release delivered on time through the six-month release cadence. This level of predictability allows developers to easily manage their adoption of innovation thanks to a steady stream of expected improvements.

 

 

Java’s ability to boost performance, stability, and security continues to make it the world’s most popular programming language.

 

JDK 20 is now available!

Oracle now offers JDK 20 for developers, end-users, and enterprises.

Oracle JDK 20 is not a long-term support (LTS) release, therefore it will receive updates only until it is superseded in six months by JDK 21.

Oracle JDK 17 (released on September 14, 2021) is the most recent LTS release of Java. Oracle announced plans to shorten the time between LTS releases, from three years to two years, so JDK 21 (September 2023) is planned to be the next LTS.

 

Java 20, Together

As we did with previous releases, with Java 20 we celebrate the contributions of many individuals and organizations in the OpenJDK Community — we all build Java, together!

JDK 20 Fix Ratio

The rate of change over time in the JDK releases has remained largely constant for years, but under the six-month cadence the pace at which production-ready features and improvements are delivered has sharply increased.

Instead of making tens of thousands of fixes and delivering close to one hundred JEPs (JDK Enhancement Proposals) every few years, as we did with yesteryear Major Releases, enhancements are delivered in leaner Feature Releases on a more manageable, predictable, six-month schedule. The changes range from significant new features to small enhancements to routine maintenance, bug fixes, and documentation improvements. Each change is represented in a single commit for a single issue in the JDK Bug System.

Of the 21,604 JIRA issues marked as fixed in Java 11 through Java 20 at the time of their GA, 15,420 were completed by people working for Oracle while 6,184 were contributed by individual developers and developers working for other organizations. Going through the issues and collating the organization data from assignees results in the following chart of organizations sponsoring the development of contributions in Java: