If I understand correctly, you’re proposing to “officially support” Java 8 and 11 (i.e. remove the “experimental” tag for Java 11). +1 on that from my side. It totally makes sense to me for 4.0.
Don’t want to hijack the original thread (as it’s just about C* 4.0), but some thoughts about post-4.0: Java 8 gets (probably just critical) patches until 2026 (e.g. from adoptopenjdk, not sure about other vendors). But I suspect 2026 is really the very last date until 8 finally gets retired. Considering that users still run C* 2.1 (released 2014) and older, it’s probably reasonable to plan to remove Java 8-support in the next version (i.e. 4.1) and require the last LTS Java (11, 17, etc) _and_ the current non-LTS (on a best-effort/experimental basis). Especially the “new GCs” (Z, Shenandoah) and a bunch of other upcoming features (e.g. Loom, Panama, Records) are very interesting and beneficial for the project. I did some experiments and a recent build works against Java 14 (and a nightly build of 15 IIRC). A couple of unit tests need to be adopted (fix the no longer working java.lang.ref.Field code in some unit tests) and Nashorn needs to be replaced (it has recently been removed). It is not that much work, it just needs to be done. — Robert Stupp @snazy > On 13. Jul 2020, at 20:42, Jon Haddad <j...@jonhaddad.com> wrote: > > Support for Java 11 was added a long time ago, and it's been about 2 years > since it was released (Sept 2018). Had we released Cassandra 4 close to > that date, I'd be fine with keeping the status as experimental, but at this > point I'm wondering if releasing a new major version of C* that's primarily > targeting Java 8 as the only "official" supported version is a good idea. > > To those of you that are planning on rolling out C* 4.0, are you planning > on using Java 8 still, or moving to 11? Speaking for myself, I can say I > don't think I'd want to use 8 anymore. If most folks are testing with 11 > at this point, I think we should consider making 11 the recommended version > and really only encouraging Java 8 for legacy purposes - teams who have a > restriction that prevents them from upgrading. > > To those of you planning on moving to 4.0 soon after it's release, are you > planning on deploying to JDK 11 or 8? > > [1] https://www.oracle.com/java/technologies/java-se-support-roadmap.html
