Last week we achieved a major development milestone, with JEP 401: Value Objects (Preview) integrated into the mainline JDK, and the `lworld` branch closed to any further development. Those features are now part of JDK 28. Future bug fixes will target the `jdk` repository directly, and future JEPs will have their own development branches in the `valhalla` repository.
Historically, this mailing list has been a firehose of development notifications (my mail client has collected over 6800 messages in the 215 days since Jan 1!). By closing the `lworld` branch, hopefully we’re turning the firehose off. Going forward, I’d love to see this space be dominated by non-automated conversations about value objects and other Valhalla features. Preview features, in particular, are designed for collecting feedback before a feature is made final, and ideally this mailing list is a lightweight way for people trying out the feature to share their experiences and learn from each other. Some open-source projects have “user” lists and “developer” lists. OpenJDK `-dev` lists bridge both of those communities, and hopefully can serve both of their needs. I’m going to keep an eye out for firehose traffic in next few weeks. If we start generating a lot of commit or PR messages, I’ll suggest either turning them off or sending them somewhere else. I think most people are happy to handle PRs directly through the GitHub UI, for example. (I *think* all the traffic may have been due to optional configuration settings of the `lworld` branch, but we’ll see…)
