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Comment by mdasen | Hacker News Reader

Java 9 and 10 were released. Java has moved to a time-based release schedule where they release what is ready for each release rather than having things block releases forever. Every third release is a long-term-support release. It's similar to Ubuntu where they release every 6 months, but then there's an LTS release that many people will wait for.

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So yeah, in essence Java went from 8 to 11 if you look at it as a sequence of major releases such as 5, 6, 7, 8, and now 11.

I think a lot of developers skipped/will skip Java 9 and 10 (Java 9 is already unsupported and effectively history), except for testing their builds and preparing for the Java 8 to 11 migration.

Java 9 was a major release. Project jigsaw (introducing modules) was a major change and blocker. Once they got that out of the way they changed the release cycle, which is why java 10 was released soon after java 9.

So they actually just went from 9 to 11, going by your logic.

Java 9 had some weird issues that at least in the Clojure world many people skipped it.

Clojure relied on many quirky hacks like putting clojure on the boot classpath and accessing JDBC from there which broke in Java 9.

It was a major release in terms of features and platform architecture, but it was not in terms of adoption. Project jigsaw at this moment is a blocker for upgrade from Java 8 - majority of developers will move from it only when it sees the ecosystem ready for that step. Now it's not - due to plenty of major libraries and tools that didn't even start the migration or still have "alpha" in their version numbers.

Also Java 9 and 10 aren't LTS-releases, which in turn causes the ecosystem to ignore them largely, because they'll be buried and forgotten by the time they're ready for Java 11.

However LTS seems not be free but restricted to premium Oracle customers, see: https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/eol-135779.ht...

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