Two years, seven months, and eighteen days after the release of JDK 7, production-ready builds of JDK 8 are now available for download!

Thanks! A major new release of a software system as large as the JDK is the direct work of many hundreds of developers, with indirect contributions from thousands more. By way of thanks I’d like to mention the major contributors here specifically:

• Brian Goetz picked up my initial straw-man proposal to add lambda expressions and default methods to Java, built it up into a better proposal, led Project Lambda in the OpenJDK Community, designed the related streams API, and achieved consensus around all of this work in the JCP. Dan Smith and Maurizio Cimadamore made major contributions to the specification and the implementation.

• Stephen Colebourne‘s popular Joda Time library was the basis for his JSR 310 proposal to bring a new — and actually usable — date and time API to Java. Roger Riggs helped polish the API and integrate it into the JDK. Richard Warburton and Jim Gough of the London Java Community‘s Adopt-a-JSR Program contributed to the development of the JSR 310 conformance tests.

• Michael Ernst proposed in JSR 308 to extend the language to permit annotations on any use of a type in order to support stronger static checking tools. Alex Buckley, Jonathan Gibbons, and Werner Dietl helped refine and implement the proposal and integrate it into the Java Language Specification and the JDK.

• Jim Laskey led the team behind Nashorn, a fast new JavaScript engine built from the ground up to leverage advanced JVM features.

• Alan Bateman and Bob Vandette led the charge to define a set of Compact Profiles for the Java SE Platform so that applications that don’t require the entire Platform can be deployed and run on small devices. Mandy Chung’s earlier work on JDK modularization laid the foundation of the Profiles.

• Richard Bair, Jasper Potts, Steve Northover, and many others brought JavaFX out into the open via the OpenJFX Project.

• Stefan Karlsson, Jon Masamitsu, and Coleen Phillimore removed the need to tune the size of the HotSpot VM’s permanent generation by removing the permanent generation itself.

• Magnus Ihse Bursie, Erik Joelsson, and Fredrik Öhrström improved the productivity of JDK developers everywhere by rewriting the JDK build system.

• Marcus Hirt led the team that ported Java Mission Control and Java Flight Recorder from JRockit to HotSpot.

Many smaller — but no less important — contributions were made via the JEP Process and in other ways by many other developers, including (but not limited to!) the following: Niclas Adlertz, Lance Andersen, Sundar Athijegannathan, Jaroslav Bachorik, Joel Borggrén-Franck, Andrew Brygin, Brian Burkhalter, Rickard Bäckman, Sergey Bylokhov, Suchen Chien, Brent Christian, Iris Clark, Sean Coffey, John Coomes, John Cuthbertson, Joe Darcy, Dan Daugherty, Mike Duigou, Xue-Lei Fan, Michael Fang, Robert Field, Daniel Fuchs, Mikael Gerdin, Jennifer Godinez, Zhengyu Gu, Kurchi Hazra, Chris Hegarty, Erik Helin, David Holmes, Vladimir Ivanov, Henry Jen, Yuka Kamiya, Karen Kinnear, Vladimir Kozlov, Marcus Lagergren, Jan Lahoda, Staffan Larsen, Doug Lea, Sergey Malenkov, Stuart Marks, Eric McCorkle, Keith McGuigan, Rob McKenna, Michael McMahon, Morris Meyer, Sean Mullan, Alejandro Murillo, Kelly O’Hair, Frederic Parain, Bhavesh Patel, Petr Pchelko, Oleg Pekhovskiy, Valerie Peng, Anthony Petrov, Pavel Porvatov, Tony Printezis, Joe Provino, Yumin Qi, Phil Race, Tom Rodriguez, Leonid Romanov, Vicente Romero, John Rose, Bengt Rutisson, Vinnie Ryan, Abhijit Saha, Dmitry Samersoff, Paul Sandoz, Naoto Sato, Thomas Schatzl, Alexander Scherbatiy, Harold Seigel, Konstantin Shefov, Xueming Shen, Serguei Spitsyn, Kumar Srinivasan, Lana Steuck, Attila Szegedi, Christian Thalinger, Igor Veresov, Hannes Wallnöfer, Joe Wang, Max Wang, Roland Westrelin, Brad Wetmore, Jesper Wilhelmsson, Hinkmond Wong, Dan Xu, Jiangli Zhou, and Alexander Zuev.

More than code Contributions of reviews, tests, and test results are just as important as contributions of code. Oracle’s internal quality and performance teams did their usual thorough job, and feedback from the wider Java community was equally valuable.

Over 400 of the more than 8,000 bug and enhancement issues addressed in JDK 8 were reported externally. These reports came in throughout the release cycle, enabled by our regular posting of weekly builds, but naturally the rate increased after we posted the Developer Preview build in September. The following early testers who submitted significant bug reports deserve special mention:

• Uwe Schindler, Apache Lucene (5 bugs)

• Robert Scholte, Apache Maven (4 bugs)

• Cedric Champeau, Groovy (3 bugs)

• Grzegorz Kossakowski, Scala (2 bugs)

Valuable reports continued to come in after we posted the first Release Candidate build in early February. Of the small number of bugs fixed after that build, two were reported externally: A serious signature bug in the lambdafication of the Comparator API, and a nasty correctness bug in the implementation of default methods.

Launch! I’ll host the official Java 8 Launch Webcast at 17:00 UTC next Tuesday, 25 March. Join me for an open question-and-answer session with panel of key Java 8 architects, and to hear from a number of other special guests, by signing up here.