I know for fact that many people (especially in the financial technology industry) are very skeptical when a new version of Java is released. People, actually persist to update their Java version (even the JRE version) for many years. There are a lot of places that are still using Java 6!
Even though, this persistence is valid for some cases, especially in the early stages of a new release, i personally find it wrong. Indeed, to upgrade the version of Java a software is using is not a simple and easy thing in most of the cases. Lots of testing needs to be done, to ensure at least the application’s performance has not degraded. Additionally, more testing is needed when the application is doing something very tailored, like calling native code in-process.
In my opinion, upgrading to the newest version is advisable for many reasons. The one i would like to mention today is the JDK evolution. Meaning, that in most of the cases a software developer will have some free gains, without him, in principal, doing anything. The code inside the JDK has some minor changes between releases. This is done for bug fixing reasons, improving performance reasons or even better for following hardware trends. There are lots of times that CPUs introduce a new instruction which solves a problem down at the silicon level, meaning faster processing. The Java engineers and in particular people who are involved in the OpenJDK project have lots of mechanical sympathy.
A well shout example is the commonly used java.util.concurrent.atomic.AtomicInteger class. There is a huge difference in the implementation for a couple of methods in this class, between Java7 and Java8. The difference is presented below:
117 public final int getAndSet(int newValue) {
118 for (;;) {
119 int current = get();
120 if (compareAndSet(current, newValue))
121 return current;
122 }
123 }
119 public final int getAndSet(int newValue) {
120 return unsafe.getAndSetInt(this, valueOffset, newValue);
121 }
There is a very important difference. Java 8 uses some code inside the Unsafe class, where Java 7 is performing a busy loop. Java 8 actually makes uses of a new CPU instruction for that. That means that the unsafe.getAndSetInt is an intrinsic function. Java’s intrinsic functions can be found here.
This is a very simple but very important reason why someone should consider regularly upgrading his/her Java version. Simple things like that, which are spread across the newer implementations can actually have a positive impact on every application.