However, an application that I had written to be backward compatible with java 1.4, 15 years ago, cannot be compiled today. And I had to make major changes to have it run on anything past java 8, ~10 years ago, I believe.
$DAYJOB got burned badly twice on breaking Go behavioral changes delivered in non-major versions, so management created a group to carefully review Go releases and approve them for use.
All too often, Google's justification for breaking things is "Well, we checked the code in Google, and publicly available on Github, and this change wouldn't affect TOO many people, so we're doing it because it's convenient for us.".
Can you clarify these 2 changes please? Cannot recall anything similar
Doubt, again. Without a minimal proof of mentioned problems continuing dialogue doesn't make sense for me, thanks.
Exception especifications, gets, GC, string ABI,...