Java 8 Officially Released 302
darthcamaro writes "Oracle today officially released Java 8, nearly two years after Java 7, and after much delay. The new release includes a number of critical new features, including Lambda expressions and the new Nashorn JavaScript engine. Java 8, however, is still missing at least one critical piece that Java developers have been asking for, for years. 'It's a pity that some of the features like Jigsaw were dropped as modularity, runtime dependencies and interoperability are still a huge problem in Java,' James Donelan, vice president of engineering at MuleSoft said. 'In fact this is the one area where I still think Java has a long way to go.'"
Re:A Javascript Engine in the JVM!? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Damnit (Score:0, Informative)
What the fuck are you going on about? Java 8 supports all the previous versions without a problem. Same for Java 7, and all the others before it. If you write code that breaks because of backwards compatibility issues, you're a retard.
Re:A Javascript Engine in the JVM!? (Score:4, Informative)
"New" is an important qualifier in the summary, because Java has had a Javascript engine since version 6, which included Rhino.
Re:Does it make Minecraft run faster? (Score:5, Informative)
Your mistake is in thinking that constructing classes in Java with new would put them on the heap.
It does not. It puts them into a special cache that is very similar to a stack, and which gets destroyed when the function exists. Objects that require more persistence than the scope they are allocated in migrate to another storage space automatically when the scope or function ends. This check isn't quite as free as just incrementing a stack pointer, but it is still extremely efficient... taking far less time than it would to manipulate values on a global heap.