
Two of these, JEP 417 and JEP 419, provide continued contribution towards fulfilling Project Panama, a project designed to improve and enrich interoperability between the JVM and well-defined "foreign," i.e., non-Java, APIs that will most-likely include interfaces commonly used within C libraries.

DIFFERENCE BETWEEN JAVA 9 AND OPENJDK 1.8 SERIES
We examine them here and include where some of these new features fall under the auspices of the four major Java projects - Amber, Loom, Panama and Valhalla - designed to incubate a series of components for eventual inclusion in the JDK through a curated merge. The final set of nine new features, in the form of JEPs, can be separated into three categories: Core Java Library, Java Tools and Java Specification.

Critical bugs, such as regressions or serious functionality issues, may be addressed, but must be approved via the Fix-Request process. The main-line source repository, forked to the JDK stabilization repository in early December 2021 (Rampdown Phase One), defines the feature set for JDK 18.

JDK 18, the first non-LTS release since JDK 17, has reached its initial release candidate phase as declared by Mark Reinhold, chief architect, Java Platform Group at Oracle.
