According to an Oracle posting to the Java mailing list, the company will ship Java Development Kit (JDK) 8 on March 18 even if it’s still a little buggy. Between now and then, the Java team will work on eliminating major bugs, paying less attention to those considered minor. “Non-showstopper bugs will be deferred to a later release in order to ensure we keep to the JDK 8 schedule and can ship on March 18,” wrote Oracle’s Mathias Axelsson.
The message also said another JDK 8 release candidate should be ready before the January 23 release date.
Some past releases of Java have contained known bugs. Recently, Oracle has come under heavy criticism over Java’s security.