Hey everyone, I wanted to start a discussion to see what folks think about moving to Java 1.8 source compatibility at some point after the 10.1 release.
Java 8 has a number of nice features that can help us build more concise, maintainable, and robust software. A few notable features that would benefit Samza: 1. Stream API - provide a compact syntax for expressing transformations on collections. These may be foundational for future API work including Operators (SAMZA-914) 2. Default Methods - enable us to evolve interfaces without breaking compatibility 3. Concurrent package enhancements - generally make concurrent programming easier, which will be more important with features like multithreading support (SAMZA-863) 4. Lambdas - love them or hate them, they do reduce the amount of boilerplate code, especially when used in place of anonymous classes. It certainly would be nice to leverage some of the features above. However, we have historically supported Java versions N and N-1 and it doesn't look like Java 9 is coming until next year. So, discontinuing support for Java 1.7 at this point would be a departure from our normal support matrix for a significant period of time. Thoughts on the pros and cons? I know some folks in this community are still on Java 1.7. How many of you stay up to date with the latest Samza? Do you have a roadmap to move to Java 1.8? Thanks, Jake
