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Comment by cyberax | Hacker News Reader

This unfortunately is not true for large codebases. The language and the basic library are extremely stable, but the overall runtime is not. So the 8->17 switch resulted in lots and lots of regressions.

So companies either pay Oracle to maintain the old JDK8, or use something like Amazon Corretto. It's so bad that there are companies promising JDK8 support until 2031 at least.

And yeah, upgrades past 17 are easy.

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> It's so bad that there are companies promising JDK8

Come on, that's absolutely not the reason behind. That just means that there are banks and such that still run goddamn windows XP completely firewalled off from the internet just because. Similarly, for some companies not touching that ancient codebase and just having it safely run worth the hassle and the money.

Java is the most backwards compatible language and it is not even a close competition.

> Similarly, for some companies not touching that ancient codebase and just having it safely run worth the hassle and the money. > Java is the most backwards compatible language and it is not even a close competition.

It's amazing to have two contradicting sentences right next to each other.

> Java is the most backwards compatible language and it is not even a close competition.

In competitions consisting of Java, PHP and Python, I presume?

In competitions of real world code in a language that has been in use for close to 30 years, and I can find a java 1.1 program that will both compile as source on the latest version, AND the original compiled version itself will run on a modern JDK as is.

And I assume this mythical 1.1 program does of course do a lot more than System.out.println and the reason that it took until recently, in part thanks to the Log4J fiasco, for 8 (almost 11 years old) to no longer be the most widely used version, was just superstition?

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