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by cesarb 2094 days ago
Isn't Android mostly based on Java 7 (for instance, the Guava artifact you need for Android is the Java 7 one)? It can't be the reason why Java 8 is popular.

I believe that the reason why Java 8 is so popular is because there were a lot of backward compatibility problems with Java 9, compounded by the fact that Java 11 (the next LTS after Java 8; both Java 9 and Java 10 had very a very short life) removed many APIs deprecated by Java 9.
1 comments
pjmlp 2094 days ago
Nope, Java 8 nowadays.

https://developer.android.com/studio/write/java8-support

All libraries that matter on the Java eco-system are already on Java 11.

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saagarjha 2094 days ago
Android's Java is like half of Java 8 :/
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pjmlp 2094 days ago
Yeah, Android Java has turned into Google's own version of J++.

Worse is that Kotlin fanboys don't get it, that without access to modern Java their Java FFI is worthless, as all Java 8+ libraries on Maven Central will slowly become useless on Android no matter what.

Additionally the language cannot expose JVM capabilities, unless they had even another backend.

So it will be stuff like value types, JNI replacement, proper generics, customized JIT and SIMD on the JVM, and plain old Java 8 on ART.

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