Java 8 Adoption Trend

Java 8 was released on 18 March 2014 and has seen a strong adoption trend right from the start.

In October 2014, Typesafe released early numbers which had the adoption rate of the new version of the language at 27%.

And in May 2015, I ran a survey that puts that number at 38%.

The New 2016 Numbers

Well, things have certainly changed over the course of a year. I ran the “Java and Spring in 2016” survey last week and received 2253 answers from the community.

The Java 8 adoption numbers in March of 2016 is at 64.3% – which is a strong spike from last years numbers.

Here's the full breakdown of Java 6, 7 and 8 usage:

Conclusion

Java 9 is coming out a year from now, and Java 8 is clearly no longer new, having been out for two years at this point.

And the high adoption numbers (on a 2000+ sample size) definitely show a strong trend in the broader ecosystem to jump in and use Java 8 more than we saw before with Java 7.