Proposed implementation of JEP 182 in JDK 11: drop javac support for -source/-target/--release 6 (original) (raw)

Emmanuel Bourg ebourg at apache.org
Fri May 11 22:43:46 UTC 2018

Le 11/05/2018 à 19:19, joe darcy a écrit :

In example, the LTS release of JDK 18 would support 18, 17, 16, 15, 14, 13, 12, 11 (LTS), 8 (effectively a LTS) with 9 and 10 not being supported.

Dropping the older non LTS releases is less of an issue. I'd suggest adjusting the source/target/release value automatically with a warning to the next supported version to avoid breaking the old projects targeting them.

Supporting only two LTS releases back, spanning 6 years with the new release cadence, feels a bit short compared to the 16 years we enjoyed with Java 8. That was quite a lot, and the level 1.2 and 1.3 were probably not much used at this point, but 1.4 was still commonly found in the wild. Supporting three LTS back would be less radical and more in line with the backward support we experienced since Java 6.

Emmanuel Bourg

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