Java enhancement plans for 2025 range from improving performance in the foreign function and memory (FFM) API, to working on ahead-of-time (AOT) code compilation, to finalizing the structured concurrency API, according to a recently published presentation from the OpenJDK community.
A January 16 video presentation by Oracle Java developer advocate Nicolai Parlog outlines the OpenJDK community’s ambitions for Java in 2025, based on Java enhancement projects Babylon, Leyden, Lilliput, Loom, Panama, and Valhalla. Another high-profile Java project, Project Amber, which develops smaller, productivity-oriented Java language features, will be the subject of second video in a week or so, Parlog said.
Project Babylon is aimed at extending Java to foreign programming models such as SQL, differentiable programming, machine learning models, and GPUs. Plans for Project Babylon in 2025 include preparing for the incubation of code reflection, as well as ongoing work on HAT (Heterogeneous Accelerator Toolkit), and exploring a prototype ONNX runtime script equivalent in Java. Goals for Project Leyden, which is aimed at improving the startup time of Java programs, include AOT method profiling and AOT code compilation.
