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Comment by vips7L | Hacker News Reader

What's wrong with java.time.* ? I've never found it to be hard to grasp.

The java.time.* are the new classes (IIRC, based on joda-time), but there are also the old time libraries in java.util.* and java.text.*. I don't know which ones the parent poster was talking about, but it might be the old ones.

Yes I know they're "new", but the Java time API was released 7 years ago with JDK 8. I don't think its fair to be critical of something that was fixed almost a decade ago.

Unfortunately a lot of people don’t have access to Java 8 on the largest customer facing Java platform (android).

The java.time libraries are available on android starting API level 26 https://developer.android.com/reference/java/time/package-su...

That is android 11, released in September of 2020 which is not widely distributed.

Does anyone know why the delay? It looks like Java 8 language features finally became compatible through some compatibility layer in Gradle 4.

Was it because of the lawsuits?

Personally, I don't consider Android to be Java and I am quite happy that Google is pushing Kotlin now instead.

Basically, yes. Google has been awfully slow at implementing some Java 8+ features. Their current solution is D8 desugaring, which basically rewites all the APIs into JDK8 compatible code.

This is incorrect. You can use APIs like java.time on any version by using desugaring: https://developer.android.com/studio/write/java8-support#lib...

The problem is that many Java projects in the wild are... well, old. Some of them haven't migrated to Java 8 yet and even then you can stuck with a lot of code using the old API.

There is sadly still new code written which uses the old API. I just inherited code from 2019 which uses the old text me API.

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