Is that why every single application will only work with some ancient version of Java?(usually 8, sometimes 1.6 or 11)
I can’t think of many cases where Java 21 is a drop in replacement, and I don’t think I anyone actually used 17.
Comment on Anon tries programming in Java
schteph@lemmy.world 5 weeks agoJava is religiously backwards compatible. Modern java projects are not as enterprisey and boilerplatey, but, as jdk21 is backwards compatible with jdk1.3, you can still happily write code as if it’s 2003.
Additionally, the java space is huge, so just wildly googling will probably not help you that much.
Hawke@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
pivot_root@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
That’s entirely the fault of applications (or more likely their libraries) using internal APIs or JNI. Compiled Java bytecode that doesn’t do anything screwy with reflection to access JRE implementation details will absolutely still work on newer Java versions.
taladar@sh.itjust.works 5 weeks ago
On the other hand back in Java 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4 days you frequently had companies install a specific patch level version because their applications worked only with that patch level. That was back when Java was actually popular for some reason.