Features of JAVA 12

Finally, the long awaited update of JAVA has been released (March 19, 2019) and it’s the JAVA 12. The new version of this independent language programming platform was released just 6 months after the prequel and it has some new amazing features and functions programmers will like to explore. Note that before you start running JAVA 12 codes, you’ll need to update your IDEA to the latest version.

One of the major features of JAVA 12 is the Switch Expression which is actually a function that enables changing the value of an expression or variable to switch up the control flow of the program execution by search and map. JAVA 12 does this as a preview language feature and is a great improvement towards pattern matching in the future of programming.

The JAVA 12 has also introduced GC algorithm (Shenandoah), this algorithm they introduced optimizes and reduce the GC pause time by capitalizing on evacuation work which runs on JAVA thread. Various pause times with Shenandoah is more effective and clearly independent of heap size which means you can have a very consistent pause time even with very high heap sizes. So on JAVA 12, the pause time is not dependent on heap size.

Another feature is the Microbenchmark Suite. JAVA added this basic suite to the JDK source code which has made it very easy for programmers and new developers to use the previously existing benchmarks and also create new ones. It has also made it very easy to add new benchmarks, updates tests as APIs and option change.

The next is a One AArch64 part, not Two. There are two different sources targeting ARM 64-bit in the JDK, one is contributed by Oracle (arm64) and the other aarch64.The JEP removes arm64 thus all source code with #ifdefs under hotspot/cpu/arm will be removed and still provide the 32bit ARM port.

JVM API Constants. This API will contain new classes like ConstantDesc, classDesc which will model the key class-file and run-time artefacts such as constant pool.

JAVA 12 has also added Default CDS Archives. The default CDS will enhance the class data sharing archive basically by using the default class list on a 64-bit platform.CDS is a feature that decreases the start-up time and is also an advantage from the memory sharing. But if the JRE is not installed with the installer, the CDS archive does not run by default and the java-Xshare:dump runs manually.

They have also introduced Raw String Literals. For example, if you have a new project and imagine you want to string a word for any reason, you can now indent on any string and when you run that programme you will see the word being printed to the console with the corresponding indent number.