Java 21: The Nice, The Meh, and the… Momentous

Every six months, there is a new Java release. Ever so often (currently, every two years), Oracle labels a release as long term support", and Java users wonder whether they should upgrade. In theory, other JDK distributors could offer long term support" for other releases, but it seems everyone is following Oracle's lead.

Should you upgrade?

Here are the major features of Java 21. I omit preview and incubator features (which you are surely not going to use in production), JVM internals, highly specialized features such as this one, and deprecations.

The answer is yes - you should definitely upgrade.