[vbezhenar]

2011 for Java is nothing. I've used JDBC driver written for Java 1.4 (2002) in Java 17 and I absolutely sure that it'll work with Java 21 just as well.

Java backwards compatibility is real and it works absolutely fine unless you do bad things.

[robertlagrant]

I think the last breaking change I remember was enumerations being added, which broke any code that used the class name as a variable name. But I could be wrong; it was almost 20 years ago.

[matsemann]

With Java 11 they hid a lot of internal functions that people had used in their code, so breaking things. But that was never really part of the public API, so strictly not a breaking change.

I remember moving to Java8 changed the iteration order of hashmaps etc, which also broke some stuff for us. But again, that was mostly our fault for relying on unspecified behavior.

[brabel]

With Java 11 they only hid it, you just need to pass some parameters to get it working. When it truly broke, I believe, was only on Java 21, which finally removed some clutches people had been using to work around the new limitations.

[v-erne]

Maybe not a part of language per se but they throw out corba in java 11 and this decimated some very old libraries that used is as dependency.

[Starlevel004]

Thread#stop no longer works as of at least Java 21.

[brabel]

True, I think since Java 17 they have been removing really obsolete stuff.. I think that's when they removed CORBA from the JDK as well (though you can still get it as a library I believe). Same with Nashorn (the JS runtime).

[xxs]

Personally I consider 1.4.2 the point where java got stable, and had a true IO (java.nio), along with a decent JIT (hotspot)

[_the_inflator]

Phew, that was around the internet Java applets phase, if I recall it correctly?

[xxs]

That much it was all about JSP/XML and stuff; J2EE too. JDO came soon after too. The applets did exist and (javax.)swing was a thing - but it was far from the focus... and of course Java was still considered slow.