Java Development Kit (JDK) 25, a planned long-term support release of standard Java due in September, has reached the initial rampdown or bug-fixing phase with 18 features. The final feature, added June 5, is an enhancement to the JDK Flight Recorder (JFR) to capture CPU-time profiling information on Linux.
JDK 25 comes on the heels of JDK 24, a six-month-support release that arrived March 18. As a long-term support (LTS) release, JDK 25 will get at least five years of Premier support from Oracle. JDK 25 is due to arrive as a production release on September 16, after a second rampdown phase beginning July 17 and two release candidates planned for August 17 and August 21. The most recent LTS release was JDK 21, which arrived in September 2023.
Early access builds of JDK 25 can be downloaded from jdk.java.net. The features previously slated for JDK 25 include: a preview of PEM (Privacy-Enhanced Mail) encodings of cryptographic objects, the Shenandoah garbage collector, ahead-of-time command-line ergonomics, ahead-of-time method profiling, JDK Flight Recorder (JFR) cooperative sampling, JFR method timing and tracing, compact object headers, a third preview of primitive types in patterns, instanceof, and switch. Also, scoped values, a vector API, a key derivation function API, structured concurrency, flexible constructor bodies, module import declarations, compact source files and instance main methods, stable values, and removal of the 32-bit x86 port.
