Red Hat will launch OpenJDK 17 production ready at the end of this year. And there are several features which include the following:

1. Switch expressions
2. Text blocks
3. Pattern matching of instanceof
4. Records
5. Restricting float pointing operating
6. Hidden classes
7. Foreign function & Memory API
8. ZGC Prod ready ~ https://openjdk.java.net/jeps/377

I’ll be doing some blog posts about the features above.

Also, in terms of overhead, the heap/native size overhead will get smaller because of the Elastic Metaspace, instead of a static. That is very interesting and certainly, I will do some benchmarks to see the comparison.

There was much stuff removal/deprecated as well, like CMS, Nashorn, RMI activation.

It is important to highlight here that ZGC, the ultra fast GC from Oracle – similar to Shenandoah in terms of speed – is now production ready as well, I think I already did one or two blog posts about it. Shenandoah is production ready in JDK 8 and JDK 11, since it was back-ported to JDK 8.