Hwæt! Over in Hadoop, there're currently a couple very long threads regarding JDK7/8 support (http://bit.ly/jdkthread1 and http://bit.ly/jdkthread2). They're worth browsing through and we should have a similar discussion here. I was particularly surprised by the point in their thread that JDK7 is slated for EOL for April 2015 ( http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/eol-135779.html), less than a year from now. As such, I'm wondering if we should effectively focus on JDK8 rather than 7 and actively work to end our JDK6 support (which has already been EOLed for more than a year). There is a JIRA to support JDK8 that David and Garry have been working on ( https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SAMZA-202); it appears the main impediment may be Gradle and may already be fixed.
Separately (and in a separate, future thread), I'd like to discuss moving away from Scala as the only implementation language for the core Scala classes and allowing Java implementations as well. I've grown quite disillusioned with Scala (http://youtu.be/uiJycy6dFSQ sums up my experience well) and am looking forward to the functional primitives JDK8 provides as a partial replacement for the promise of Scala. Additionally, I'm terrified at the prospect of trying to trying to support Scala implementations on JDK8 and beyond. The details for Java-as-well-as-Scala and Java-instead-of-Scala should be discussed separately, but either would likely need to be predicated on moving to JDK8 in order to not lose the functional approach that has worked well in the code. As such, I'd like to propose moving to JDK8 as soon as we can with that platform as the default target. With JDK7 having less than a year of practical shelf life, it'd be better to not find ourselves in the same 6-to-7 issue we have now a year from today. Thoughts? -jakob
