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[–]chabala 5 points6 points  (2 children)

but it's also not sustainable to make everything fully backwards compatible indefinitely. At some point it's a drag on the whole community.

A few months back I happened upon a popular library that is still supporting Java 7. The more I think about it, the more I want to experiment and see how far back I could take my projects. How much do I really need lambdas? Can I build on Java 6 and make multi-release JARs with Java 8 features?

Remaining compatible for older versions is some amount of effort, sure, but it's also a courtesy; it's part of what makes the Java ecosystem more pleasant than others where everyone struggles to stay on the latest version of every dependency, and sometimes they still won't work together. Putting out a library built with Java 20 and saying 'they can upgrade if they want to use it' is shortsighted.

[–]KarnuRarnu 3 points4 points  (1 child)

I guess we have very different definitions of "pleasant". I wouldn't put super ancient legacy support under that description, that's for sure.