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When Oracle acquired Sun in 2010-11, Sun had not shipped a new release of Java in more than four years.[0] That's hardly a "stability" worth treasuring. Since

When Oracle acquired Sun in 2010-11, Sun had not shipped a new release of Java in more than four years.[0] That's hardly a "stability" worth treasuring. Since then, Oracle completely open-sourced the JDK and the associated tools and gave the the compatibility kits to the community to use. The result is that there are now several different distributions of the JDK. This is undeniably a good thing. As to the 6-month release cycle, it allows the community to get new features on a much faster cadence than any of the other major languages. If it's too fast for your preferred way of doing things, stick with the LTS releases, which come out on a three-year cycle and include all the features from the prior releases. There might be reasons not to like Oracle, but their stewardship of Java has been pretty good. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_version_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_version_history

sneeeeeed 5y ago
Since Oracle took over we’ve had a release every few months. That’s terrible. It should be a few weeks, at most.
yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
> When Oracle acquired Sun in 2010-11, Sun had not shipped a new release of Java in more than four years.[0] That's hardly a "stability" worth treasuring. Sun went several years without releasing a new major version, but that same page lists frequent minor updates. So yes, I would call that exactly a stability to treasure.
- krzyk 5y ago
  More like stagnation.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
    I mean, yes, there were fewer major features, but there were feature releases in those minor updates; there's nothing wrong with having stable software. Are you also one of those people who complain that stable Debian and RHEL releases include old software? Not everyone wants to live on the bleeding edge, and Java was a heavily enterprise ecosystem (for better and worse:]).
    - kaba0 5y ago
      And the latest release is no bleeding edge. After eg. “feature freezing” JDK 17 before release, there was no subsequent changes to the codebase, meaning, they found no bugs whatsoever, which did happen beforehand.
      - krzyk 5y ago
        Exactly, I don't get it why people think JDK 12-16 are inferior in any way, this is normal software tests in same way as any other JDK version. The only difference appears after 6 months after release - if you don't want to upgrade (you should) you have to find vendor that will sell you support for given release. E.g. Azul provides it for 11, 13, 15, 17. Oracle for 11 and 17. Adoptium provides builds (not LTS) from 11 and 17 branches, where some vendors push their bugfixes. So it is like a semi-LTS, they won't fix your bugs, but if someone fixed a bug it most likely will end up on that branch.
  - josefx 5y ago
    Java language development itself wasn't stagnating, as far as I understand only the release process was stuck on a licensing dispute. IBM and other members of the Java Community Process stonewalled every new feature in the hope that they could force Sun to certify Apache licensed Java implementations like Harmony.

sneeeeeed 5y ago

Since Oracle took over we’ve had a release every few months. That’s terrible. It should be a few weeks, at most.

yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago

> When Oracle acquired Sun in 2010-11, Sun had not shipped a new release of Java in more than four years.[0] That's hardly a "stability" worth treasuring. Sun went several years without releasing a new major version, but that same page lists frequent minor updates. So yes, I would call that exactly a stability to treasure.

krzyk 5y ago
More like stagnation.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  I mean, yes, there were fewer major features, but there were feature releases in those minor updates; there's nothing wrong with having stable software. Are you also one of those people who complain that stable Debian and RHEL releases include old software? Not everyone wants to live on the bleeding edge, and Java was a heavily enterprise ecosystem (for better and worse:]).
  - kaba0 5y ago
    And the latest release is no bleeding edge. After eg. “feature freezing” JDK 17 before release, there was no subsequent changes to the codebase, meaning, they found no bugs whatsoever, which did happen beforehand.
    - krzyk 5y ago
      Exactly, I don't get it why people think JDK 12-16 are inferior in any way, this is normal software tests in same way as any other JDK version. The only difference appears after 6 months after release - if you don't want to upgrade (you should) you have to find vendor that will sell you support for given release. E.g. Azul provides it for 11, 13, 15, 17. Oracle for 11 and 17. Adoptium provides builds (not LTS) from 11 and 17 branches, where some vendors push their bugfixes. So it is like a semi-LTS, they won't fix your bugs, but if someone fixed a bug it most likely will end up on that branch.
- josefx 5y ago
  Java language development itself wasn't stagnating, as far as I understand only the release process was stuck on a licensing dispute. IBM and other members of the Java Community Process stonewalled every new feature in the hope that they could force Sun to certify Apache licensed Java implementations like Harmony.