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Comment by javanese | Hacker News Reader

So, uh, how many people are using Java 8?

I still see projects using Java 5...

The vast majority of projects, at my employer. I personally upgraded several hundred JVMs running several dozen services - upgrading was simple and almost entirely painless.

In addition to benefiting from the new features, being up-to-date is good for recruiting. You tell someone they'll be working with Java 6 and (in the absence of other evidence) they'll assume it's a legacy product suffering from chronic under-investment. Not exactly the impression you want to give job seekers!

> they'll assume it's a legacy product suffering from chronic under-investment.

Or Android.

Hopefully they'll ditch Java and go with a superior language.

I don't believe, given what they repeat at every Google IO when people ask about it.

Also I don't have any issue with Java as I do like the language and use it since JDK 1.0.1.

My issue is with Android Java, a forked version of Java with cherry picked features of Java 6, 7 and now 8, just because Google didn't want to pay Sun.

A version that will be even harder to write portable code when Java 9 and 10 come out.

Or perhaps they know better than to release confidential information about their roadmap?

I believe Google is running out of solutions to further optimize Android because they keep running into self inflicted Java roadblocks. If Fuchsia is any indication of their future efforts their next major overhaul will support multiple first class languages.

Check the bios of many of the major Android team leads, some of them were former Java developers at Sun, which I think has a big weight on Java's role on Android.

As for Fuchsia and Brillo, it remains to be seen if they will ever be productified.

Also I don't believe that Dart is a better option than Java in regards to performance.

Presumably they'd know that they applied for an Android job.

The annoying thing is that Java 8 is the only currently supported version of the language. The glacial development speed somehow still manages to deprecate versions faster than they fall out of use.

While Java 8 is the only version that is freely supported from Oracle, it is still possible to buy commercial support for older versions of Oracle's Java platform.

The speed at which they stop freely supporting older versions feels much like a way to squeeze big, slow moving organizations for support contracts.

I appreciate that, even with this "fast" pace I still need to target Java 7, and I am aware of projects in even older versions.

Indeed, see http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/eol-135779.html

> I still see projects using Java 5...

Are you serious? Even the worst shops I've been at have at least moved their JVMs to Java7 back around 2014. I mean you can take all your existing JARs from Java4 and run them on Java8 and nothing should break. Recompiling them might be another issue, but still not a huge one.

Yes, the problem is when you as a developer have zero value for the company IT and have to make the application run on the servers that IT configured for the whole enterprise, not just our snowflake application.

Earlier this year I was working with an outfit that was on Java 4 for A Really Important Business Application. That said, they were looking at moving to IIRC 7 just as I was leaving.

True, but if you are running something like WebSphere or Weblogic then upgrading your JVM invalidates product support. So, now you have to upgrade product versions, which often requires changes to deployment scripts, breaking changes in those products, new software licenses, etc.

Having said that being on and old supported version of these products means you are at least enjoying Java 6.

... and we use WebSphere 7 because we like to read hackernews while publishing our code ...

You lucky ones!

My last contact with Websphere was in 2014 and the customer was still using 6.1 on their production servers.

Most not totally old projects are on JDK8. Don't look at some crufty apache product, but look at medium size business apps... those have all been JDK8 for a while now.

> Don't look at some crufty apache product, but look at medium size business apps...

What do you think those medium sized business apps are built off of if not things with JVM dependencies? It's not so simple.

Depends a bunch.

Some things like Guava got more or less obsolete in JDK8.. so seeing it targeting JDK5.. doesn't really matter.

Also JDK5 stuff will work on JDK8.. so you can suck in all the JDK5 libraries you want, but still run a JDK8 project.

According to http://www.baeldung.com/java-8-adoption-march-2016, the breakdown for march 2016 was 64% Java 8, 29% Java 7 and 6% Java 6.

I am. Granted, it's only the blog hosted from my basement.

I worked for a insurance company last year, and it stills use Java 6

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