The State of Java in 2020: Java 8 is still ahead

In a blog post, the tech company New Relic shared their findings on what Java technologies are being used—from language versions to garbage collection algorithms. As the company explains, “Every day, tens of millions of Java virtual machines (JVMs) share their data with New Relic.” This data was anonymized and analyzed.

SEE ALSO: Top Java technologies in 2020 – JVM programming languages, IDEs, tools & more

So, let’s take a look at the results.

Java 11 is still no match for Java 8

As we know from other recent studies, Java 8 continues to be the most used Java version in production, and New Relic came to the same conclusion. Altogether, Java 8 was used in production in 84.48% of analyzed cases.

In this study though, the Java 8 result was further split up into three different versions: current (recently updated), lagging (significant risks), and vulnerable (“a source of serious concern”). Thankfully, the latter was being used by only 3.83%. The lagging Java 8 though was still used by 38.63%, whereas less than half (42.02%) of all cases were found to be using the current Java 8.

Java 11, which is also an LTS release, was being used by 11.11%, and all other Java versions stayed below the threshold of 3 percent.

AdoptOpenJDK is on the rise

Not surprisingly, the list of Java vendors is topped by Oracle (74.78%), but others are on the rise!

Although AdoptOpenJDK (7.06%) may not seem like it has a large share, New Relic claims that it has been rising in popularity based on an unreleased smaller dataset. IcedTea was being used by 5.30 percent.

Garbage collectors

New Relic didn’t stop there, as the tech company wanted to find out which Java garbage collection algorithms are most popular.

Parallel (57.77%) makes up over half of the results, with G1 (24.99%) in second and CMS (17.20%) in third place. ZGC (0.04%) ranks fourth, and Shenandoah, which is being used by less than 0.01 percent, comes in last.

SEE ALSO: Java trends: Top 10 Frameworks in 2020

For some additional findings, see the New Relic blog post.

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