JDK 12 News (13 September 2018)

With General Availability of JDK 11 planned for later this month (25 September 2018), it's a good time to start looking more closely at JDK 12.

In a message titled "Proposed schedule for JDK 12" on the OpenJDK jdk-dev mailing list, Mark Reinhold announced, "With JDK 11 nearly out the door, here's a proposed schedule for JDK 12." The schedule for JDK 12 proposed in that message includes the "Release-Candidate Phase" starting on 31 January 2019 and "General Availability" of JDK 12 on 19 March 2019.

There are already two JEPs targeted for JDK 12 and both of them are "preview features" (my previous blog posts on these JEPs are listed as sub-bullets):

• JEP 325 ["Switch Expressions (Preview)"]
  • "Switch Expressions Coming to Java?"
  • "Enhancing Java switch Statement with Introduction of switch Expression"
  • "Playing with JDK 12's Switch Expressions"
  • "JDK 12: Switch Statements/Expressions in Action"
  • JDK 12 Switch Expression Encountering Unanticipated Enum Value
• JEP 326 ["Raw String Literals (Preview)"]
  • "Raw String Literals Coming to Java"

JDK 12 Early Access Build 11 was also released today. Build 11 addresses several minor issues and implements multiple minor changes.