Hi all,

what is everyones opinion on moving the IJ2/Fiji stack to a new version of 
Java, i.e., Java 7.
Java 7 has been around for more than 3 years now. The end-of-life final public 
release of Java 6 was more than 1.5 years ago.

Benefits I see are the following:

* We could use the “new" Java 7 libraries. For example the Fork/Join framework 
would come handy in defining multi-threading interfaces in scijava-common (to 
be used in imagej-ops for example). Or the NIO2 stuff (java.nio.file)

* We would benefit from improvements of type inference for generics in the 
compiler. No more jumping through hoops to fix “errors” in code that should 
compile with Java 6 but doesn’t. (Plus we could use the diamond operator to 
shorten generics instantiations.)

* We could use third-party libraries that only support Java 7. For example I’m 
using Jetty in a project that can therefore not be part of Fiji currently. 
(This mail was more or less triggered by me looking into http://ojalgo.org who 
maybe went a bit over the top and already abandoned Java 7 for Java 8). I think 
it is only a matter of time until we will have a problem with third-party 
libraries that we already use abandoning Java 6.


I do not have a clear picture of what the downsides would be. Johannes always 
said that people on old macs are tied to an old java version and that we do not 
want to leave those users behind. It would be interesting to know how many 
people that actually would impact.


What do you think?

best regards,
Tobias
 

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