This week, Oracle officially released the latest version of its programming language, Java 19, and JDK 19.

At the same time, the open source version of OpenJDK 19 is also available from Oracle under the GNU V2 General license.

Java has topped the TIBOE programming charts several times in recent years, and Python remains in the top three even as it gains momentum.

Java 19 has been six months since Java 18 and exactly one year since Java 17. In fact, Oracle promised to update the Java version every March and September, and this time it did so without skipping a ticket.

Java 19 comes with seven Jeps (JDK feature additions and improvements proposal), including Vector API (JEP 426), Linux/RISC-V port (JEP 422), virtual threading (JEP 425), Pattern Matching Switch Version 3 Preview (JEP 427), and more.

Risc-c is the third CPU rising to rival ARM and X86 systems, and virtual threads will help improve the performance of large server applications.

Despite Oracle's enthusiasm for the Java version number, developers and programmers are actually somewhat unenthusiastic. At the beginning of the year, 37% of developers were stuck with Jav 8, which was released in March 2014, 29% were using Java 11 for development, and only 37% said they would consider switching to Java 17 LTS (Long term support).

The next LTS long-term support release is scheduled to be Java 21, which will be released next September.