Java 26 is here, and with it a solid foundation for the future

Java 26 is here! Six months ago, we welcomed Java 25 into our hearts, which means it’s time for another fresh helping of Java features. This time, the set of features is a bit smaller compared to some of the previous releases, which can only mean one thing: the focus for this release was to provide a solid foundation for something big to be released soon™️! My hope is that the first JEPs out of Project Valhalla will be announced later this year. That hope is fueled by some of Java 26’s changes as they feel like appropriate preparation steps for the first Valhalla features (this is especially true for JEPs 500 and 529).

Regardless of any future plans, this post focuses on everything that has been added in this release, giving you a brief introduction to each of the features. Where applicable the differences with Java 25 are highlighted and a few typical use cases are provided, so that you’ll be more than ready to start using these features after reading this.

Photo by Rodolfo Quirós, from Pexels

JEP Overview

To start off, let’s see an overview of the JEPs that ship with Java 26. This table contains their preview status, to which project they belong, what kind of features they add and the things that have changed since Java 25.

JEP Title Status Project Feature Type Changes since previous Java version 500 Prepare to Make Final Mean Final Core Libs Deprecation Warnings 504 Remove the Applet API Client Libs Deprecation Deprecation 516 Ahead-of-Time Object Caching with Any GC HotSpot Performance New feature 517 HTTP/3 for the HTTP Client API Core Libs Extension New feature 522 G1 GC: Improve Throughput by Reducing Synchronization HotSpot Performance New feature 524 PEM Encodings of Cryptographic Objects Second Preview Security Libs Security Minor 525 Structured Concurrency Sixth Preview Loom Concurrency Minor 526 Lazy Constants Second Preview Core Libs New API Major 529 Vector API Eleventh Incubator Panama New API None 530 Primitive Types in Patterns, instanceof, and switch Fourth Preview Amber Language Minor

New features

Let’s start with the JEPs that add brand-new features to Java 26.

HotSpot

Java 26 introduces two new features in HotSpot:

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