[Brystephor]

1) dependencies need to be upgraded. for example, not all versions of Gradle support all Java versions. So you need to upgrade Gradle to upgrade Java.

2) other things are deemed to have higher priority.

3) people are satisfied with existing features and don't want to spend energy to upgrade to something that doesn't provide immediate value.

4) folks aren't educated on what the benefit of switching would be so why would it be prioritized? This is a case of "they don't know what they don't know".

I work on a team using Java 8 daily. It's fine. It's got things I wish it didn't (no null in switch statements for example) but I don't care about that so much that I'm going to go through the pain of upgrading 7-9 services in the mono repo, their dependencies, and then test them all to be on a new version of Java.

[belfthrow]

1) is garbage. Since grade 6 you can run on 22 ea with no issues. Use toolchains, as they say on their docs.

2) no shit. What business user is every in their mind prioritising upgrading their language version? It's not up to them to push the upgrade. It's yours.

3) of course they are. People don't desire what they don't want. Invest in people who are actually interested in improvement of their software.

4)the java team have been pushing heavily via twitter / youtube / infoq / hacker news / other open jdk providers all the new features for every single java version during their 6 months release cycles. If your devs / your team don't know about it, then maybe again youre not encouraging people to want to improve on what they have, or take interest in the tech they work in.

I mean that is fine, do I give a shit what java version in using for my take home salary? No...but I enjoy using the newest, most interesting and useful tools. And you best believe those people are more attractive to other companies and you working on some 15 year old java 8 tech.

[Brystephor]

1) you're assuming every one is on Gradle 6 or higher lol. I can assure you that is not true.

2) Sure, pushing and making the decision are not the same thing. I can complain and persuade as much as possible and it doesn't mean it's going to happen.

3) I agree that you want people who care about improving software. Upgrading language versions isn't always the best route to do that though.

4) I don't think everyone on the team is reading about the latest updates in the world of Java. I think a pretty small portion of engineers are keeping 100% up to date, following Twitter accounts for Java dev, watching YouTube videos on it, etc. All that is educational and that's great to know but for most people, it's not going to help them work better because they know about features they can't use.

5) definitely sounds aggressive but okay. I haven't found a company yet who's complained about working in Java 8 versus 11/17. If a company is hiring for a role that uses Java, they're likely not limiting their candidates to those who've used their version of Java. It's a pretty standard language and if you know any other object oriented language, you'll be fine.

[vips7L]

You’re just delaying and making the upgrade worse when the time comes. It’s much easier to upgrade now to 11 and then 17 and then 21 rather than try to upgrade from 8 to 27 when 8 is finally EOL.

Whether you perceive there to be no immediate benefit (hint: there is, Java 8 is an antiquated runtime) or not, delaying upgrading until Java 8 EOL is a way larger risk than upgrading now.

[Brystephor]

I've never done a language upgrade. I don't know what it takes. I've heard 8->11 is painful and 11->17 is not. So doesn't that mean jumping from 8->17 directly is mostly the same as going from 8->11?

I'm not saying there is no benefit. I'm not saying there is no risk. I agree that going from 8->17 would be worse than 8->11->17.

My point is to list out reasons why a team may not be able to just spend a day upgrading (dependency issues) or why someone might not be given the time to do it.

[krzyk]

Gradle/groovy is a liability for any jdk upgrades (similarly like lombok, but it usually supports new JDK at release, not before).

We ditched spock because of groovy, and never looked back. Now at jdk 21, previously at 20.

[brabel]

That's pretty disingenuous. Groovy has always run on newer JDK versions before they even get released.

One year ago, Gpars already supported Virtual Threads: https://groovy.apache.org/blog/gpars-meets-virtual-threads

As a heavy user of Groovy/Spock, though, I agree that upgrading Groovy itself can be challenging, unfortunately. Really depends though on how many edgy Groovy features you relied on :).

[krzyk]

Not always for sure. We started JDK upgrades with 9 and went +1 every half year and Groovy was lacking with one of 10, 11, 12 or 13. It got so tiring that we had to let it go. Fortunately our tests were mostly JUnit 5, so it wasn't much of work.

We only used it for Spock AFAIR.

[brabel]

If you're upgrading every minor Java version, then yeah, I agree Groovy and most other dependencies that may not work on Java version changes off the bat (Lambok, probably Spring and other heavy frameworks like Micronaut and Quarkus, build tools like Gradle... many more) are going to slow you down. You end up with a very simple project if you remove all of that, which is actually a good thing if you can afford doing it.

[krzyk]

Those are not minor versions, that's quite natural path and is supported by every lib we used, except groovy. And this is the encouraged path for JDK upgrades, people are lazy, but not us :)

Spring supports new JDK release ("minor version" like you called them, those between 11 and 17 and 21) before release. The only exception was with JDK 13, there was about 2 week slip there.

Lombok (I don't like it) supports every such version at release (not before unfortunately).

Other libs didn't even error out (we keep them at newest versions possible, aside from Jakarta madness).

So from the major libs/frameworks, the only thing that slowed us down was groovy.

[brabel]

I see your point... I've never upgraded to the non-LTS Java versions (almost no one is doing it - as you can see in any survey about it - which in itself is enough for me not to be the "brave" one doing it!) so I don't know how much pain that would've been. To me that just shows that Groovy could do with a bit more attention as I find it to be a great language, specially with Spock... it has made our tests so much nicer. It does have some warts but those are mostly a result of the lack of attention it receives, unfortunately, not some fundamental issues with the language.

[NovaX]

Kotlin, not Groovy, has been the culprit for slower Gradle support. I believe there was some split module pain in Groovy wrt Java 9, but it has been very smooth since then. The Kotlin compiler on the other hand is not very forgiving.

This is a moot point because your the build execution and the project compile/run can be on different JDKs. It is a tiny amount of configuration to decouple them, e.g. to use an EA build.

[krzyk]

Yeah, you are right that decoupling build tool JDK and compile JDK is the way to go.

But Groovy does indeed not work, or has support very late for releases between 8, 11, 17 and 21 - so for anyone that wants to stay current (and not wait 3 or 2 years), using groovy in your code will be a pain - that might be also possible for other JVM languages, but I don't know, haven't used them.

[NovaX]

Oh interesting. Typically the gradle release notes, like 8.4-rc-1, will have comments that imply that Groovy build scripts compile but Kotlin ones lag.

"Gradle now supports using Java 21 for compiling, testing, and starting other Java programs. This can be accomplished using toolchains. Currently, you cannot run Gradle on Java 21 because Kotlin lacks support for JDK 21. However, support for running Gradle with Java 21 is expected in future versions."

https://docs.gradle.org/8.4-rc-1/release-notes.html#support-...