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Upgrading to a new JDK every 6 months is pushing a bit too hard if you ask me. In case of JDK 8 -> JDK 11 (LTS to LTS) you even have only 4 months.

A new JDK may have breaking changes, which may require code changes, acceptance testing, deployment to many customer sites. It is not unusual for that process to take 6 to 12 months, and you certainly do not want to repeat that process every 6 months.

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So better start today making sure it runs on Java 10.

It doesn't need to be deployed straight into production.

Surely there will be very few things to fix by the time 11 is ready.

Preview releases exist exactly for that.

We don't need Python 2/3 dichotomy on Java.

My main point with Java upgrades is not source code, but different behaviour in production. Or some side effects you didn't get in testing.

You don't test just for a couple of hours.

One sets up a test machine as part of the continuous integration worflow.

Yes, but with every large applications I've been bitten by non-functional problems in production with major Java migrations, as non-functional testing is usually not as extensive as user testing.

The answer was to:

"So better start today making sure it runs on Java 10. It doesn't need to be deployed straight into production."

Making sure it runs on Java 10 is not the problem, I expressed myself too fuzzy.

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