[hibernate-dev] Dropping support for Java 8 in Hibernate ORM (Search) v6 ?

[Christian Beikov]

Hey,

I'm not sure it is a good idea to do this for Hibernate ORM 6 already as 
that would probably hinder adoption. Some projects just didn't update to 
Java 9+ yet because using the newer versions would have no real benefit.

We can use the Multi-Release JAR feature to make use of JDK features 
introduced in newer Java versions. Since the Java 11 doesn't provide any 
significant languages changes for which it would be worth dropping 
support for Java 8, I see no reason for raising the minimum version 
requirement.

We can benefit from Jigsaw already by defining module-info file and let 
the moditect plugin(from Gunnar) compile it. If necessary, we can make 
use of the Multi-Release JAR feature to use the module system APIs.

How about raising the minimum Java version for Hibernate ORM 7 instead?

Regards,

Christian

Am 24.07.2020 um 16:00 schrieb Sanne Grinovero:
> Hi all,
>
> [meta: I had this email as a draft on hold since a year; very glad to
> finally be able to send it.]
>
> We're usually quite conservative in dropping support for older JDKs
> within the Hibernate team, but there's an increasing maintenance (and
> development) cost when keeping older JDK compatibility for too long.
>
> In particular, Java 8 compatibility was so far still a requirement for
> various strategic integrations; first, we had runtimes targeting
> GraalVM still needing it, but they support Java 11 now as well; after
> that, Azure Functions were also still requiring Java 8, but this
> limitation was resolved now.
>
> We're aware that Java 8 is still widely used; still I think we need to
> look forward - for various reasons, including maintenance burden, and
> to deliver a better experience on the later versions of the JDK. Also,
> looking at the existing usage statistics implies a fallacy: that's
> current production usage, while the code we normally work is
> (typically) not going to see production usage for quite some time.
>
> While we'll want to keep Java 8 compatibility for existing
> [maintained] releases, there is no compelling reason anymore to keep
> doing this for the upcoming major releases.
>
> So I'd propose we require Java 11 the minimum compatible runtime for
> ORM v6 onward, and I'd suggest we do the same with all our actively
> developed projects.
>
> Initially, I don't really expect this to significantly increase the
> efforts from our already packed roadmaps: in the first stage this
> proposal is literally only about making minimal changes to our build
> scripts to change the compatibility versions, and for CI to stop
> testing the JDK/branches combinations which are no longer supported.
>
> In a second step, as convenient, we'll be able to:
>   - do some code cleanup / refactorings to benefit from the minor API
> improvements of the JDK
>   - some APIs had more substantial improvements, such as java.sql now
> features native support for multi-tenancy, literals and identifiers
> enquoting [among others] .. might be interesting.
>   - finally benefit from Jigsaw?
>
> Any thoughts?
>
> Thanks,
> Sanne
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