Hi Laurent It makes sense to me. I started this "move" (on the plugin side of the thing) as part of the reproducible build effort.
At code level, I think it would be great to leverage some features from Java 17+ (I'm thinking about record, memory API, etc). I would be more than happy to help on this as soon as we have a consensus. Thanks, Regards JB On Mon, Apr 1, 2024 at 7:48 PM Laurent Goujon <laur...@dremio.com.invalid> wrote: > > Hello Arrow Java developers, > > I would wonder if the community would be okay to change the minimum Java > version used by the build toolchain to at least Java 17 or 21 (or even 22). > This is different from changing the minimum Java version used at runtime > which would still be 8 (following the vote from last september). > > Concretely it would mean: > * Java 21 would be required to build Arrow Java > * But Arrow would still be compatible with Java 8 > * Unit tests should keep running with Java 8 and higher. > > Reasons for changing the toolchain would be: > - More and more tools and plugins now require at least Java 11, forcing the > project to keep using older/unsupported versions > - We hacked our way to support Java modules with > https://github.com/apache/arrow/tree/main/java/maven/module-info-compiler-maven-plugin > - There are several new features which we could conditionally include in > the Arrow project like VarHandle (Java 9) and Foreign Function and Memory > API (Java 22) to move away from Unsafe support which require more and more > workarounds (Apache Lucene is a project which has managed to introduce > support for multiple Java incubator and final API while maintaining > compatibility with previous Java versions). But doing it from Java 8 > creates a higher barrier. > > Laurent
