JDK 16 is the open-source reference implementation of version 16 of the Java SE Platform, as specified by by JSR 390 in the Java Community Process.
JDK 16 reached General Availability on 16 March 2021. Production-ready binaries under the GPL are available from Oracle; binaries from other vendors will follow shortly.
The features and schedule of this release were proposed and tracked via the JEP Process, as amended by the JEP 2.0 proposal. The release was produced using the JDK Release Process (JEP 3).
- 338: Vector API (Incubator)
- 347: Enable C++14 Language Features
- 357: Migrate from Mercurial to Git
- 369: Migrate to GitHub
- 376: ZGC: Concurrent Thread-Stack Processing
- 380: Unix-Domain Socket Channels
- 386: Alpine Linux Port
- 387: Elastic Metaspace
- 388: Windows/AArch64 Port
- 389: Foreign Linker API (Incubator)
- 390: Warnings for Value-Based Classes
- 392: Packaging Tool
- 393: Foreign-Memory Access API (Third Incubator)
- 394: Pattern Matching for instanceof
- 395: Records
- 396: Strongly Encapsulate JDK Internals by Default
- 397: Sealed Classes (Second Preview)