I am +1 on the JDK8 move. As Jake has elaborated, there are numerous advantages from 1.8 source compatible code.
As for the downside of dropping JDK7 support, obviously, bin backward-compatibility will be broken. However, moving to JDK8 binary is not a big effort for JDK7-compatible Java and Scala source code, in term of compiling and packaging. There is no need for source code change and we have been building JDK8 binary in LinkedIn and running in production w/ JDK8 for a long time w/o seeing any issues. For users cannot upgrade their runtime JVM version to JDK8 easily, the latest coming release will still be on JDK7. Question is: how long should we hold back in waiting for this upgrade? Thanks! -Yi On Wed, Apr 27, 2016 at 6:27 PM, Jacob Maes <jacob.m...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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 >
