Sehrope Sarkini along with Claude has written a new JDBC driver from scratch. It's currently in pre-release. Here's an excerpt from his blog
The native API is designed around PostgreSQL's wire protocol and feature set. It is not designed around the lowest common denominator that JDBC has to support across every database on earth. If PostgreSQL can do it, the API should be able to say it directly.
Full JDBC compliance is a long-term goal. There's already a java.sql.* layer that registers a Driver and gives you Connection, PreparedStatement, ResultSet, DatabaseMetaData, DataSource, and XA. But it's built on top of the native API rather than dictating its shape. That ordering matters. Once JDBC's assumptions get into the execution core they never come back out.
For a decade, "fast driver" implied an async or reactive API, because the alternative was a thread per connection. On Java 21 that trade is gone. pg-java is ordinary blocking-style code that is careful never to pin a carrier thread (which mostly means ReentrantLock instead of synchronized around I/O). You can run thousands of connections on virtual threads without an event loop or a callback API in sight. It's also significantly easier to reason about both how it works and how you would use it.
The core query primitive is a pull cursor. It reads exactly enough off the wire to produce the next row and never buffers a whole result set. forEach, map, collect, and friends are adapters built on top of it, not a second read path.