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It makes me wonder why moving away from Java is not an higher priority for the Android Team. According to the AOSP tracker, their current efforts at the language level seem to center on the integration of Java 8.

Sure, as far as languages go, I there are many tasks more beneficial to the platform than changing its language, but the legal issues they are encountering sound like another good motivation.

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No way Google can move Android completely away from Java until long after the legal situation is resolved one way or another. There's just too much third-party code.

The AOSP tracker only discloses their public efforts. I wouldn't be surprised if Google has been working on a parallel Android project to replace their use of Java with another language - perhaps one that they developed. In fact, I believe it would be irresponsible of them not to have a Plan B in place should the situation become any more untenable.

Huh? They haven't even delivered Java 7 yet.

Android supports Java 7 since October 2013.

Really? The last time I checked invokedynamic, java.lang.invoke, java.nio.file.* and many more were still missing.

It supports java 7 syntax. Invoke dynamic you mentioned is a jvm feature, which dalvic isn't one. I think the lack of nio is an annoyance that can be fixed tho.

> It supports java 7 syntax. Invoke dynamic you mentioned is a jvm feature, which dalvic isn't one.

invokedynamic is a bytecode. Not supporting it means Dalvik / ART can't accept valid bytecode.

> I think the lack of nio is an annoyance that can be fixed tho.

Apparently not. A quick check also suggests that ClassLoader#registerAsParallelCapable is missing.

IIRC they have both java 6 7 & 8 configurations in the new jack & jill toolchain. I don't know if it necessarily means that the integrality of Java 7 & 8 features will be ported.

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