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20 Reasons to Move On from Java 8

Andrew (he/him) on November 23, 2019

"Those who don’t want to supply what life demands suffer the consequences. If you don’t want to change, you are left in the back. If you don’t wan...
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Jean-Michel 🕵🏻‍♂️ Fayard

Meanwhile Android is still blocked at Java 7.5, slowing down the whole ecosystem!

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Swastik Baranwal

They switched to Kotlin sadly.

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Julian Jupiter

But Java is still there. And Kotlin uses JVM. Android does not leverage on much of Java 8. People complain of Java's verbosity and yet Google does not push newer JVM. Since Android M, Android has been using OpenJDK, GPL-licensed, so the case between Oracle and Google should not matter in using newer JVM version.

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Jean-Michel 🕵🏻‍♂️ Fayard • Edited

(edit: misunderstanding from my part)

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Julian Jupiter

Read my comment again as to which I'm referring to when I said "should not matter".

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Jean-Michel 🕵🏻‍♂️ Fayard • Edited

Switching to kotlin is good IMHO,
But it's in no way a valid reason to slow down progress on the Java/JVM side.

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Fernando B 🚀

Kotlin still runs on JVM fyi.

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Jean-Michel 🕵🏻‍♂️ Fayard

The kotlin compiler has to target Java 8 bytecode because of Android. It would be more efficient it it could target newer JVM.

Kotlin programmers leverage Java libraries all the time, and those are stuck in Java 8 if they want to support Android.

Tldr: both Java and Kotlin devs would be better off if the Android framework team stopped slowing down progress of Java and the JVM.

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Fernando B 🚀

Have not got caught up in the Google vs Oracle debacle but newer versions of Java now require enterprise licensing. Is the reason why we have "open jdk". Looks to me like Oracle wants to cash in big time.

The slow down could be merely a legal issue, but that's just my guess.

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edh_developer

Important to remember that Java 9 introduced breaking changes. That's why, for instance, Jenkins on any Java version > 8 was broken for years. Much like going from Python 2 to Python 3, before you commit, be sure the things you need to work are going to continue to work.

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Andrew (he/him)

Yeah, Hadoop still doesn't work on Java >8, as far as I know.

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Erik Pischel

Wrong! There is commercial support for java 8 from Oracle! If you are commercial yourself (e
g. use it in a company) you already have to pay for it. If you're non-commercial, you get updates for free until the end of next year.

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Sadhan Sarker

Lots of things covered! Thanks for sharing that's types of summary.
Please let it keep update.

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Varun Rana

Lots of things covered! Thanks for sharing that's types of summary.
Please let it keep update.

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drew

Holy chit this is huge. Book marked :)

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Christopher Elias

So what would happen If google suddently decides to upgrade the JVM?

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