Java 26 Released: G1 GC Improvements & HTTP/3 Support

Java 26 is out today. 10 JEPs, and a few worth paying attention to if you run production JVM services. The G1 GC throughput improvements are probably the most immediately useful: 5-15% gains with no configuration changes required. If you have high-throughput services on Java 21+, that is a free upgrade that might be worth scheduling soon. HTTP/3 client support lands as a proper JEP — useful if you are building services that need QUIC transport or are working with APIs that have moved to HTTP/3. Worth checking whether your stack benefits before assuming it does. Lazy constants (renamed from stable values) give you a clean, JVM-supported way to declare values that are computed once and then treated as constants by the runtime. Useful pattern for expensive initialisations that currently end up as static final hacks. Structured concurrency gets another preview round, Valhalla groundwork continues quietly in the background, and the Applet API is finally removed. Deprecated since Java 9. Nobody's application broke. If you are on Spring Boot 3.x, you are already on a JVM that supports Java 21. Java 26 is not an LTS release, but the G1 improvements alone are a reasonable argument for teams running performance-sensitive workloads. Full release breakdown in the comments. #Java #SpringBoot #SoftwareDevelopment #DevOps #CloudNative

  • Java 26 is out today. 10 JEPs, and a few worth paying attention to if you run production JVM services.

The G1 GC throughput improvements are probably the most immediately useful: 5-15% gains with no configuration changes required. If you have high-throughput services on Java 21+, that is a free upgrade that might be worth scheduling soon.

HTTP/3 client support lands as a proper JEP — useful if you are building services that need QUIC transport or are working with APIs that have moved to HTTP/3. Worth checking whether your stack benefits before assuming it does.

Lazy constants (renamed from stable values) give you a clean, JVM-supported way to declare values that are computed once and then treated as constants by the runtime. Useful pattern for expensive initialisations that currently end up as static final hacks.

Structured concurrency gets another preview round, Valhalla groundwork continues quietly in the background, and the Applet API is finally removed. Deprecated since Java 9. Nobody's application broke.

If you are on Spring Boot 3.x, you are already on a JVM that supports Java 21. Java 26 is not an LTS release, but the G1 improvements alone are a reasonable argument for teams running performance-sensitive workloads.

Full release breakdown in the comments.

#Java #SpringBoot #SoftwareDevelopment #DevOps #CloudNative

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