Java 26 has been released with improved G1 garbage collector, HTTP/3 support, and more

Oracle has released Java/JDK 26, now generally available for developers, enterprises, and end-users. This version delivers ten enhancements proposed through JDK Enhancement Proposals, introducing four preview features and one incubator feature. Innovations span the Java language, security, performance, libraries, and targeted maintenance.

Among the highlight features, JDK 26 supports primitive types in patterns, instanceof, and switch statements, creating a more uniform and expressive language, especially for AI inferencing tasks. The G1 garbage collector is now more efficient, with reduced synchronization to allow applications to process greater workloads. Security sees a boost with a new API for PEM encodings of cryptographic objects, improving compatibility and safety across formats. Ahead-of-time object caching is now available with any garbage collector, accelerating Java application start-up times and increasing resource efficiency.

Following these advancements, the deprecated Applet API has been removed, shrinking both installation and source code footprints while addressing security and performance concerns. Other features include groundwork for enforcing final class semantics, support for HTTP/3 in the client API, and structured concurrency for better observability and reliability in multithreaded code. The release also introduces lazy constants and the Vector API, offering more flexibility for AI, data-driven, and compute-intensive applications.

Additionally, Java 26 also offers dozens of improvements that help organizations enhance application security, reliability, and performance.