Hacker News Reader

Comment by taftster | Hacker News Reader

I mean, that's OK though. Not sure why this is considered such a bad thing. You're missing out on some new language features, sure, but Java 8 is still reliable and rock solid. There's lots of companies that have hesitation or even inability to upgrade, hopefully there's at least some initiative and/or direction to do so.

A company that is head-in-sand deliberately not upgrading from Java 8 is one thing. A company that is just being conservative and intentional about the upgrade path, that's another entirely different thing.

I don't mind a company that has been using Java so much that it's just a slow process for them to get on the next thing. Old libraries that need to be recompiled for Java modules, etc. Hopefully it happens for you soon.

View on HN

There's very little reason not to upgrade from Java 8 at this point. Everything should be a drop-in replacement and there are significant performance benefits (garbage collection is leagues better) to doing so.

The bigger problem is that a lot of places are stuck on Oracle JDK - 8u252 is the last free version so a lot of places just decided they'd never upgrade, nor do they want to look at whether Temurin or Coretto would work for them (the answer is usually yes).

Almost. The Java module system (introduced in Java 9 and enforced in Java 11) still plagues companies and/or slow-to-update libraries. Particularly companies that have written a lot of their own in-house libraries and such.

Custom libraries have, unfortunately over the years, picked up the bad habits (by forking/following public libraries) relying on reflection and packages that shouldn't be directly used (sun.* packages, etc.). So companies are wedged in because they made the poor decision to rely on private packages. And now, Java 11+ enforces this by default.

There are open source Java libraries today that don't run unless you "add-exports" to basically everything. google-java-format comes to mind, because it's using an internal java code parser from the JDK, for example.

In the latest LTS those all can still be enabled, so while it is a serious problem when they are finally removed, for now it's not really a good reason to block an upgrade.

I think that's fair. Yes, there is an escape hatch currently available. But what is hard is knowing if your application is relying on any internal/private behavior that it shouldn't. Since the dependency hierarchy of most Java projects is very deep, it's hard to know if any dependencies of A -> B -> C -> D are going to call into restricted areas. You might not even know you have a problem until runtime, because you've --add-exports everything and now you have a stacktrace to try and deal with in production.

But yes, maybe not a good reason to completely block an upgrade. It's just postponing the pain, though.

> Everything should be a drop-in replacement

This is not true for many applications. Due to the removal of many APIs from the JDK with Java 9, I needed the following dependency artifactIds to be able to move a JEE application with SOAP web services to Java 11: jaxb-api, jaxb-core, jaxb-runtime, istack-commons-runtime, jboss-jaxws-api_2.2_spec, glassfish-corba-omgapi, jboss-annotations-api_1.2_spec, activation, jboss-saaj-api_1.3_spec, saaj-impl, stax-ex, jsr181-api, txw2.

Many of these spec API/implementations are provided by different artifacts that are incompatible with each other. Some I only discovered when something failed at runtime as they perform implementation lookups and you don't get compile errors.

Additionally, many of the Maven plugins we used no longer worked and our application server failed to start.

Are you really actually using CORBA? That would be heartwarming if so. Maybe just RMI over IIOP?

It's far less exciting I'm afraid: we use [0] to generate our DB IDs and it implements org.omg.CORBA.portable.IDLEntity.

We could fork it and remove the interface or switch to ULID[1] instead.

[0] https://github.com/stephenc/eaio-uuid/blob/master/src/main/j...

[1] https://github.com/ulid/spec

Shame :(

Given that interface is trivial, you could also just define it in your codebase. I've done that a few times for shimming small bits of log4j and Spring that some library uses, when i would rather not have those as a dependency.

> Everything should be a drop-in replacement

It isn't at all, in my opinion. Consider the introduction of the module system, for example.

Some libraries moved out of the core language.

Except 9, 11, 14 and 16 where breaking backwards incompatible changes were introduced? And then the talk of changes in libraries, remapping imports from JEE to Jakarta... that's a long, long way in Java.

Isn't 202 the last version?

I think that the main problem upgrading beyond Java 8 is Java 9 and module system and a lot of javax package classes that were removed. It will be very helpful a tool that can detect what modules or classes that are being used by your codebase and add them as maven or gradle dependencies and add them to the classpath.

The main problem with upgrading beyond Java 8 is that it's Android! And we all know how THAT went.

> I mean, that's OK though. Not sure why this is considered such a bad thing

For existing software, sure. But the problem I guess is when there are a lot of newer projects starting and everyone is stuck on the older version

Totally fair. I guess I would hope in that case that the new effort would target a modern Java release, preferably Java 17 or greater. If a company is sticking with Java 8 for new initiatives, yeah, they probably have a culture problem and are not going to be happy with that decision.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com