There was a desire by some developers to keep JavaFX runnable with the
most recent LTS of the JDK. I think it might be a harder sell to bump
the minimum to 18. I'd love to hear from more developers on this.
Regarding code snippets, as long as it doesn't break the build if we use
them, I don't see why we can't start doing that (e.g., if the build
fails with "unknown tag" or similar, that would be bad). We will produce
any docs that we build and deliver using JDK 18 for now, and JDK 19 when
we update the build to that (even though the minimum would remain at 17).
As for future version bumps, my thinking is that we would do it at least
after the next LTS or whenever there is an interesting feature we want
to take advantage of.
-- Kevin
On 7/19/2022 7:31 AM, Nir Lisker wrote:
Why is the bump to JDK 17 and not 18? In 18 the feature for Code
Snippets in Java API Documentation was added and it could be useful
for any new API.
Is the plan to continue to pump the minimum version with every release
or once in several? Does it depend on the benefit the new features add?
On Tue, Jul 19, 2022 at 4:44 PM Kevin Rushforth
<[email protected]> wrote:
Even though we build JavaFX binaries with JDK 18 as the boot JDK, the
latest version of JavaFX still runs with JDK 11 (and is capable of
being
built using JDK 12 or later, and with some limitations, using JDK
11),
although it isn't tested with older JDK versions. In order for
JavaFX to
be able to use newer JDK features, such as records, switch
expressions,
text blocks, and so forth, we need to increase the minimum version of
the JDK that can run the latest JavaFX. Additionally, there is an
ongoing cost to keeping JavaFX buildable and runnable on older
versions
of Java, and very little reason to continue to do so.
To this end, I propose to bump the minimum version of the JDK
needed to
run JavaFX 20 to JDK 17. I filed JDK-8290530 [1] to track this. This
will not affect update releases of earlier versions of JavaFX (e.g.,
JavaFX 17.0.NN), which will continue to run with the same minimum JDK
that they run on today.
As a reminder, we only assure that JavaFX NN will run with JDK
NN-1 or
later, although in practice, we haven't bumped the minimum
required JDK
version in several releases. So, while JavaFX 19 is built using
JDK 18
as the boot JDK, it produces class files that will run with JDK 11,
using "--source 11 --target 11". The proposed change discussed here
would update that in JavaFX 20 to "--source 17 --target 17".
NOTE: this will not be an invitation to do wholesale refactoring of
existing classes or methods to use newer language features (e.g.,
a PR
that turns a bunch of existing data classes into records would not be
welcome). Rather, this can be seen as enabling judicious use of new
features in new code, much as we did when we started allowing the
use of
"var".
Absent a compelling reason to remain stuck in the past, I plan to
send
out a pull request for this change next week.
Comments are welcome.
-- Kevin
[1] https://bugs.openjdk.org/browse/JDK-8290530
