JDK 26: The new features in Java 26

The G1 GC proposal notes that although G1, which is the default garbage collector of the HotSpot JVM, is designed to balance latency and throughput, achieving this balance sometimes impacts application performance adversely compared to throughput-oriented garbage collectors such as the Parallel and Serial collectors:

Relative to Parallel, G1 performs more of its work concurrently with the application, reducing the duration of GC pauses and thus improving latency. Unavoidably, this means that application threads must share the CPU with GC threads, and coordinate with them. This synchronization both lowers throughput and increases latency.

A short-term release of Java backed by six months of Premier-level support, JDK 26 will follow the September 16 release of JDK 25, which is a Long-Term Support (LTS) release backed by several years of Premier-level support.

The HTTP/3 proposal calls for allowing Java libraries and applications to interact with HTTP/3 servers with minimal code changes. Goals include updating the HTTP Client API to send and receive HTTP/3 requests and responses; requiring only minor changes to the HTTP Client API and Java application code; and allowing developers to opt in to HTTP/3 as opposed to changing the default protocol version from HTTP/2 to HTTP/3.

HTTP/3 is considered a major version of the HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) data communications protocol for the web. Version 3 was built on the IETF QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections) transport protocol, which emphasizes flow-controlled streams, low-latency connection establishment, network path migration, and security among its capabilities.