Java 26 is releasing on March 17th with 10 JEPs covering new features, previews, and removals. Key changes include JEP 500 (making final fields truly final with warnings for mutation), JEP 516 (AOT object caching with ZGC), JEP 517 (HTTP/3 support in the HTTP client), and JEP 522 (G1 GC throughput improvements). Preview features include structured concurrency API (6th preview), lazy constants (renamed from stable values, 2nd preview), and primitive types in patterns (4th preview). Notable removals include Thread.stop(), the Applet API, and Infiniband SDP support. Other developer-facing changes include Unicode 17 support, JDBC 4.5 MR updates, ByteOrder converted to an enum, virtual thread unmounting improvements during class initialization, and a dark theme for Javadoc.
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