eclipse
Move next major release of Eclipse Collections (12.0) to Java 11
Java 17 will be released on September 14, 2021. Java 11 has been out since September 25, 2018. Java 8 was released in March, 2014.
Eclipse Collections major releases are happening roughly every two years, so when we release 11.0 in October 2021, Eclipse Collections 12.0 would likely have a target release date of Q4 2023. This would put the EC 12.0 release around the time of the Java 21 release schedule, and 6 months before Java 8 celebrates its 10th anniversary.
I believe 11.0 should be the last major version of Eclipse Collections compiled with Java 8. We can have 1 -3 minor releases of 11.x compiling on Java 8, but then should target a 12.0 release on Java 11.
Thoughts?
I am actually in 2 minds about this to see what all breaking changes we have. Because it’ll be easier to have Java 11 and EC 11 have similar version numbers vs confusing with Java 11 and EC 12. if we don’t have many breaking changes then I think we can do a 10.x in a month or so and a EC 11 version in 6 months with upgrading the version.
But I am also fine if we just go with EC 12 and JDK 11.
Now all that said, since EC is bytewise compatible with future versions, what will we gain by bumping up the min version? Most other open source libraries are still supporting JDK 8 upwards and none of them have bumped up their minimum version. Are there any specific features for JDK-11 we are looking to have?
- Full support for leveraging JPMS.
- Reduce total number of builds to two LTS (11, 17) versions (down from soon to be three LTS versions - 8, 11, 17) and one EA version
Java 8 unit tests : ~12 mins Java 11 unit tests : ~9 mins
+1. I second the idea of upgrading the Java version to 11 for our next major version 12.0.
@nikhilnanivadekar I do see your point if the versions match( EC 11 and JDK 11), but I think we should just focus on the EC 11 release, which will work with our Java 8 users, and target the Java version upgrade for our next major release (EC 12).
