The vast majority of projects, at my employer. I personally upgraded several hundred JVMs running several dozen services - upgrading was simple and almost entirely painless.
In addition to benefiting from the new features, being up-to-date is good for recruiting. You tell someone they'll be working with Java 6 and (in the absence of other evidence) they'll assume it's a legacy product suffering from chronic under-investment. Not exactly the impression you want to give job seekers!
I don't believe, given what they repeat at every Google IO when people ask about it.
Also I don't have any issue with Java as I do like the language and use it since JDK 1.0.1.
My issue is with Android Java, a forked version of Java with cherry picked features of Java 6, 7 and now 8, just because Google didn't want to pay Sun.
A version that will be even harder to write portable code when Java 9 and 10 come out.
Or perhaps they know better than to release confidential information about their roadmap?
I believe Google is running out of solutions to further optimize Android because they keep running into self inflicted Java roadblocks. If Fuchsia is any indication of their future efforts their next major overhaul will support multiple first class languages.
Check the bios of many of the major Android team leads, some of them were former Java developers at Sun, which I think has a big weight on Java's role on Android.
As for Fuchsia and Brillo, it remains to be seen if they will ever be productified.
Also I don't believe that Dart is a better option than Java in regards to performance.
The annoying thing is that Java 8 is the only currently supported version of the language. The glacial development speed somehow still manages to deprecate versions faster than they fall out of use.
While Java 8 is the only version that is freely supported from Oracle, it is still possible to buy commercial support for older versions of Oracle's Java platform.
The speed at which they stop freely supporting older versions feels much like a way to squeeze big, slow moving organizations for support contracts.
Are you serious? Even the worst shops I've been at have at least moved their JVMs to Java7 back around 2014. I mean you can take all your existing JARs from Java4 and run them on Java8 and nothing should break. Recompiling them might be another issue, but still not a huge one.
True, but if you are running something like WebSphere or Weblogic then upgrading your JVM invalidates product support. So, now you have to upgrade product versions, which often requires changes to deployment scripts, breaking changes in those products, new software licenses, etc.
Having said that being on and old supported version of these products means you are at least enjoying Java 6.
Yes, the problem is when you as a developer have zero value for the company IT and have to make the application run on the servers that IT configured for the whole enterprise, not just our snowflake application.
Earlier this year I was working with an outfit that was on Java 4 for A Really Important Business Application. That said, they were looking at moving to IIRC 7 just as I was leaving.
Most not totally old projects are on JDK8. Don't look at some crufty apache product, but look at medium size business apps... those have all been JDK8 for a while now.
In addition to benefiting from the new features, being up-to-date is good for recruiting. You tell someone they'll be working with Java 6 and (in the absence of other evidence) they'll assume it's a legacy product suffering from chronic under-investment. Not exactly the impression you want to give job seekers!