Java: Looking to the Future While Keeping Its Foundations

Java has been around for 20+ years. In that time, it has been declared dead many times, but Java is still the world most popular programming platform. We at the Java team want it to be vibrant and relevant for the next 20+ years too. We plan to continue to do this by staying relevant to the problems people want to solve, staying relevant to the hardware people want to run on and keeping the promises we've made to our users. We want to stay consistent to our principles.

Evolving Java is a hard task given the number of constraints that we have. The main one is compatibility, the success of the language is due in a great deal to the fact that code written 20 years ago just works. But as organisms in the real world, Java has to evolve to stay relevant. In this talk we talk about what we are doing to evolve the Java language, in particular we talk about projects like Valhalla which will introduce value types and project Amber which will modernize the language while reducing its verbosity.