Hi Chesnay, Thanks for bringing this up for discussion. Big +1 for dropping Java 8 and deprecating it in 1.15, given that Java 8 support will end. We already see other dependencies that Flink use either have dropped support for Java 8 (Trino) or are going to drop it (Kafka).
Best regards, Martijn On Mon, 22 Nov 2021 at 16:28, Chesnay Schepler <ches...@apache.org> wrote: > As with any Java version there comes a time when one needs to ask > themselves for how long one intends to stick with it. > > With Java 17 being released 2 months ago, and the active support for > Java 8 ending in 4 months, it is time for us to think about that with > regard to Java 8. > > As such I'd like to start a discussion about deprecating support for > Java 8 in 1.15. > We do not need to arrive with an exact date for the removal in this > discussion; the main goal is to signal to users that they should > (prepare to) migrate to Java 11 _now_. > That said, we should consider dropping the support entirely in the next > 2-3 releases. > > There are of course some problems that we are already aware of, like the > Hive/Hbase connectors that currently do not support Java 11. > However, we mustn't hold back the entire project because of external > projects that are (way to) slow to adapt. > Maybe us deprecating Java 8 would also add a bit of pressure to get on > with it. > > There are numerous advantages that properly migrating to Java 11 would > bring us (simplify build system, easier support for Java 17, all the API > goodies of Java 9-11, new garbage collectors (Epsilon/ZGC/Shenandoah)). > > Let me know what you think. > >
