Re: [Netrexx-develop] RxJrt.nrx supporting --add-modules

[Rony G. F. <Ron...@wu...>]

On 27.01.2022 13:53, Marc Remes wrote:
> And a side note..
> You need java 9 or above to compile and run this.
>
> Which brings up another topic : are we ready to stop supporting java 8?

Please no, unless you want to remove most of the Java installed base for NetRexx.
:)

Seriously, NetRexx should support Java 8 as long as Java 8 gets supported by OpenJDK distributors.
E.g. Oracle and Azul support Java 8 until December 2030, for very good reasons! Actually Java 8 gets
currently a longer support than Java 11 LTS and Java 17 LTS, believe it or not.

[BSF4ooRexx still supports Java 6 as its baseline (that is the reason for "6" in "641", "41" means
ooRexx baseline is version 4.1) as there are companies/organizations that have still Java 6
deployed. This incurs quite some overhead and support efforts as in Java 6 one needs to use
java.lang.reflect whereas starting with Java 9 one must use java.lang.invoke instead (actually
BSF4ooRexx uses by default java.lang.invoke starting with Java 8 as Java 7, where this package got
introduced, has some missing support in that area).]

In general a good overview of the support dates for different versions of Java by different
distributors can be found here: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_version_history>.

---rony