They aren't killing it. They're steadily designing safe and API stable replacements for its features, with equal performance. That is a very impressive engineer

They aren't killing it. They're steadily designing safe and API stable replacements for its features, with equal performance. That is a very impressive engineering feat! For instance fast access to un-GCd off heap memory is being added at the moment via the MemoryLayout class. Once that's here apps that upgrade won't need to use Unsafe anymore. MemoryLayout gives equivalent performance but with bounds checked accesses, so you can't accidentally corrupt the heap and crash the JVM. They've been at it for a long time now. For instance VarHandle exposes various low level tools like different kinds of memory barriers that are needed to implement low level concurrency constructs. They're working on replacements for some of the anonymous class stuff too.