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Comment by relics443 | Hacker News Reader

Well that was unexpected.

I'm assuming they'll translate bytecode for older API versions? Or will Java 8 only be available for newer API versions?

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Are you expecting anybody from the Android team to explain themselves? They've been answering every question about Java 8 with "no comment" for years. They didn't even discuss Jack/Jill's relation to Java 8 support when the tooling was announced, and external developers had to figure out Android's plans on their own from what they could decipher from the architecture.

Well, when you have an ongoing lawsuit with Oracle you have to careful of what you say in public.

They are the ones to blame for it.

Apparently every other commercial JVM vendor doesn't have any issue to comply with licenses, while offering their own changes to Java stack.

IBM, MicroEJ, Atego, just to cite three examples out of many.

Um, do you realize that those licenses prohibit using it on a phone, because Sun/Oracle wanted to protect JavaME? So what you're asking for is for Google to not do Android, and then they wouldn't have the problems that they're having doing Android. That's... not a useful suggestion.

Google could use them on the phone, they just needed to PAY Sun just like everyone else, but of course they wanted to have the cake for free.

Given that APIs can't be copyrighted, why shouldn't they have that particular cake for free?

(Actually, the current court ruling is that APIs can be copyrighted, but re-implementing them is fair use. My personal IANAL opinion is that that won't stand - it will either turn into "APIs can't be copyrighted" or else into "APIs can be copyrighted, and the copyrights are not worthless - you can't copy it and have it be fair use". We shall see. Nevertheless, at the time Google copied the API, the assumption in the whole industry was that an API could not be copyrighted. Your statement that Google "wanting their cake for free" carries a tone of moral criticism that is unwarranted by the circumstances.)

Perhaps, but I will say that none of them are nearly as juicy of a lawsuit target as Android, which controls like 70%-ish of the multi-billion device smartphone market right now.

James Gosling stated multiple times that the only reason Sun didn't sue Google and Jonathan made that public announcement was the state of Sun's bank account.

Just search for "Google slimmed Sun".

I've moved on to Kotlin. Much more enjoyable for Android development IMO.

Huh, Android team has been explaning themselves around Java 8 issues a lot (look at I/O talks, linked redding thread in another comment here, etc.)

Yeah, it does a similar thing like RetroLambda - things like lambdas are polyfilled and replaced on bytecode level. Some features require newer VMs and I'm afraid standard library won't be expanded with new APIs.

See https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/5zf1xo/future_o...

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