It has now been almost a year and a half since I called a vote to drop JDK 1.4 support for 1.9.0. Is anyone thinking about when to drop JDK 5 support for running Ant
itself, e.g. in 1.10.0 or whatever? (Keeping the ability to fork older tools for <javac> etc. of course.) Jenkins has already done so in dev builds, and Maven devs are
discussing it. Eclipse Kepler and IDEA 12 both seem to require JDK 6+, and NetBeans 7.4 beta already requires JDK 7+. Potential benefits of a 6+ dependency include:
· fewer combinations to test—do not need to debug test failures only occurring
on JDK 5 any more
· easier to test against baseline JDK (cannot download JDK 5 without oracle.com
login, and IIUC it is not available on Macs at all)
· OpenJDK 6 exists, so we would be based on an OSS platform (no OSS Java 5 impl
is widely used)
· -target 6 bytecode is faster to load due to split verifier, reducing Ant run
time a bit
· miscellaneous new APIs useful to us, e.g. File.setWritable which makes
/usr/bin/chmod unnecessary in most cases, or java.io.Console, etc.
· javax.script instead of having to depend on BSH
. javax.tools so that in-process javac can be run with a supported API (incl.
rich diagnostics, virtual input files, etc.)
· javax.annotation.processing & javax.lang.model for various purposes, e.g.
compile-time verification of task class signatures if defining tasks w/ annotations
Of course Java 7 introduces more things of interest, such as java.nio.file and minor language improvements, but I expect Java 6 is still widely enough used at this point
that requiring 7+ would be unpopular.
This message should not be considered a proposal so much as a testing of the
waters.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@ant.apache.org
For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@ant.apache.org
