Although not due to arrive until March 2021, Java Development Kit (JDK) 16 has begun to take shape, with proposed features including concurrent thread-stack processing for garbage collection, support for C++ 14 language features, and an “elastic metaspace” capability to more quickly return unused class metadata memory to the OS.
JDK 16 will be the reference implementation of the version of standard Java set to follow JDK 15, which arrived September 15. The six-month release cadence for standard Java would have JDK 16 arriving next March.
As of October 8, eight proposals officially target JDK 16. The new capabilities coming to Java 16 include:
