JEP 181, JEP 315, and JEP 333 Proposed to Target JDK 11

Three more Java Enhancement Proposals were proposed for targeting JDK 11 today. The three JEPs are JEP 181 ["http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/181"], JEP 315 ["JEP 315: Improve Aarch64 Intrinsics"], and JEP 333 ["JEP 333: ZGC: A Scalable Low-Latency Garbage Collector (Experimental)"]. The targeting of these three JEPs for JDK 11 was announced today on the OpenJDK jdk-dev mailing list in the respective posts "JEP proposed to target JDK 11: 181: Nest-Based Access Control", "JEP proposed to target JDK 11: 315: Improve Aarch64 Intrinsics", and "JEP proposed to target JDK 11: 333: ZGC: A Scalable Low-Latency Garbage Collector (Experimental)". Each JEP proposal is open for roughly one week and, if there are no objections, will be targeted officially to JDK 11 next week.

The purpose of JEP 181 is to "introduce nests" and the JEP's "Summary" states that "nests" are significant because they "allow classes that are logically part of the same code entity, but which are compiled to distinct class files, to access each other's private members without the need for compilers to insert accessibility-broadening bridge methods." A nice overview of JEP 181 can be found in the article "Java Nestmates Makes Progress," in which author Ben Evans describes this JEP as "a technical enhancement to the platform that pays off a 20 year old architectural debt introduced in Java 1.1."

The purpose of JEP 315, according to its "Summary," is to "improve the existing string and array intrinsics, and implement new intrinsics for the java.lang.Math sin, cos and log functions, on AArch64 processors."

The experimental JEP 333 introduces the "Z Garbage Collector," which the JEP's "Summary" section states is "also known as ZGC" and "is a scalable low-latency garbage collector." I like the "At a glance" sentence in the "Description" section that explains, "ZGC is a concurrent, single-generation, region-based, NUMA-aware, compacting collector. Stop-the-world phases are limited to root scanning, so GC pause times do not increase with the size of the heap or the live set." The JEP also explicitly states, "It is not a goal to provide working implementations for platforms other than Linux/x64." Important limitations of the initial version of ZGC are spelled out in the aptly named "Limitations" section which states, "The initial experimental version of ZGC will not have support for class unloading." Another limitation listed in that same section is, "ZGC will initially not have support for JVMCI (i.e. Graal)."

With today's announcements, there are now four JEPs waiting approval to be targeted for JDK 11. Besides the three covered in this post, JEP 330 had its review process for targeting JDK 11 extended to this week. Nine JEPs have already been targeted to JDK 11 as of this writing.