Hacker News Reader

People forget that doing backward breaking changes take a while. Python 3 was released at the end of 2008, 2 years after Java 6. How many systems you know still run on Java 5?

View on HN

Java 6 did not break backward compatibility (code written for Java 5 generally runs fine on Java 6).

Code written for Java 2 runs fine on Java 8, with extremely limited exceptions. Java, just as Windows, is used too much in enteprise apps to lose backward compatibility.

Yup. Biggest roadblocks in java update are bytecode manipulation libraries and at the moment maven.

I'm still intrigued by this situation: I'm running my software on java 8, but I can't compile it as java 8 unless I do that by hand (... really?)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com