Why hasn't Netbeans added support for JDK-9 in the stable release yet?

Question

Netbeans 8.2 stable release does not work with JDK 9. You can't even open a project.

It's been 5 months since the release and they still haven't fixed the issue. The development release does not have this problem, though.

So why aren't they fixing the bug when Netbeans is the recommended IDE from Oracle? IntelliJ IDEA does not have this issue.

Answer 1

NetBeans development is moving to the Apache Foundation. Currently it's an incubating project. See here for more information:

• http://incubator.apache.org/projects/netbeans.html

• https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/NETBEANS/How+to+Participate

It's a tremendous amount of work to move a project. I believe the intent is to have NetBeans "graduate" out of incubation status first and then to release Apache NetBeans 9 with JDK 9 support. See links for updated status and schedules.

If you pull the NetBeans sources from Apache and build it, the result will support JDK 9 just fine. You can also poke around on the incubation site and find current development builds. (I'm not including a direct link because things are likely to change, and because these aren't GA builds.)