Hi Damjan, I can only comment on a non-technical POV...
Am 09.07.2017 um 14:53 schrieb Damjan Jovanovic: > Hi > > Currently our Java policy [1] mandates a baseline of Java 5, which was > released in 2004, and was EOL from 2008; even paid Oracle customers stopped > getting updates in 2015 [2]. That page was last updated in 2008, so it might definitely need an overhaul. ;-) > There are many language and class library improvements in later versions of > Java that we would benefit from in AOO, and if there are no objections, I > would like to increase the minimum version to 7, if not 8. At least the OS/2 port still relies on Java 6 [http://trac.netlabs.org/java]. But I think the support is still at beta stage... > Java 7 would give us the badly needed try-with-resources feature, better > type inference for generics, and Java 8: lambdas and method references, > better java.util collections and lambda-based APIs for them, unsigned > integer arithmetic, etc. > > The only possible downside I see is that the few alternative JVMs that do > exist, tend to only work with older version of Java, for example, the > Apache Harmony class library used in earlier versions of Android only > supported Java 5, GNU Classpath also 5, CacaoVM only supports 6 [3]. > Alternative Java implementation aren't relevant to desktop users > (x86/amd64/sparc) any more, since OpenJDK provides free/open-source JVMs > for those, but other platforms and more exotic use cases do need them, eg. > the ARM JVM is only available from Oracle as a commercial product, and the > BugVM project that compiles Java to native code for the iPhone, uses the > Harmony-based Android library. > > Having said that, there are ways to compile most Java 7 code into Java 5 > classes. For example try-with-resources compiles into a normal > try-catch-finally, with calls to the Exception.addSuppressed() API that > only exists on Java 7, but the class file can be changed to eliminate them; > I already have a tool that does this. So I guess it's only 8 that's > controversial, as it's lambdas compile into "invokevirtual" instructions, > which didn't exist prior to Java 7. > > Anyway I am proceeding with (uncommitted) development under the assumption > at least 7 is ok, and will revisit with 8 if possible. Please object soon > if you do :-). I still have problems to build AOO for Windows with Java 8. One user mentioned a problem with JavaDoc due to an API change in Java 8. [http://blog.joda.org/2014/02/turning-off-doclint-in-jdk-8-javadoc.html] Regards, Matthias > > Damjan > > References: > [1] https://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Policies/Java_Usage > [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_version_history > [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Java_virtual_machines >
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