Two JEPs Proposed for JDK 13: Enhancing AppCDS and ZGC

Two JDK Enhancement Proposals (JEPs) were proposed for JDK 13 this week on the OpenJDK jdk-dev mailing list. Mark Reinhold posted these proposals in messages with titles that indicate the JEP topic: "JEP proposed to target JDK 13: 350: Dynamic CDS Archives" and "JEP proposed to target JDK 13: 351: ZGC: Uncommit Unused Memory."

The "Summary" of proposed JEP 350 ["Dynamic CDS Archives"] states, "Extend application class-data sharing to allow the dynamic archiving of classes at the end of Java application execution. The archived classes will include all loaded application classes and library classes that are not present in the default, base-layer CDS archive." JEP 310 introduced "Application Class-Data Sharing" (AKA "AppCDS") via JDK-8185996 and in conjunction with JDK 10.

JEP 351 ["ZGC: Uncommit Unused Memory"]'s "Summary" section states simply, "Enhance ZGC to return unused heap memory to the operating system." The "Motivation" section adds more background details, "ZGC does not currently uncommit and return memory to the operating system, even when that memory has been unused for a long time. This behavior is not optimal for all types of applications and environments, especially those where memory footprint is a concern." "ZGC" refers to the "Z Garbage Collector" and more details regarding it can be found on the OpenJDK ZGC page and on the ZGC Wiki page. The main project page states, "The goal of this project is to create a scalable low latency garbage collector capable of handling heaps ranging from a few gigabytes to multi-terabytes in size, with GC pause times not exceeding 10ms."

Both proposed JEPs will be officially targeted for JDK 13 next week if no objections are raised or if any raised objections are "satisfactorily answered."