Shoot, I got paid to write a brand new Java 8 application… in 2020
this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2025
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My team was just handed a Java 1.2 codebase, we are deploying it (mostly as is) to production next week.
Make sure you enable the right flags on the JVM, such as this one:
B-but why?
Uh… the customer is always right?
Fair enough, though I'd imagine there's some actual platform constraint to force using an old version for a new project
Yeah, that’s what it was. The software was going to be deployed to a range of aircraft of various ages and the oldest ones only supported Java 8.
somewhere off in the distance i hear a familiar jingle: '3 billion strong.. and growing'
that statistic of java running on 3 billion devices is because of j2me phones
I wonder if they're counting the SIMs in smartphones.
Also on Blu-Rays
https://www.oracle.com/technical-resources/articles/javabluray.html
"the very popular PlayStation 3 gaming console"
And that was in 2013. Weren't most of those devices feature phones?
iPhone came out on in 2007, smartphones took over pretty fast after that. Motorola Droid in 2009 and Nexus one in early 2010.
According to https://www.oracle.com/java/technologies/java-se-support-roadmap.html, Java 8 Extended Support will end in December 2030
The universe ends December 2030
imagine if this was the date
Imagine if it was the cause!?
Could be
With about 5 asterisks next to it, and indefinite sustaining support. I don't think Java 8 is going to die even after the universe ends.
They'll probably extend it at least through the 2038 bug.
all the minecraft players still using java 8 for pvping on 1.8.9
But why?
In short: Money
Long story: Legacy
The really long story: They added a bunch of stuff in that version and it's the last LTS before they removed a bunch of other stuff and a lot of companies are just too lazy to update their 10 year old crappy software.
The end.
I thought the main reason was that they changed the license
That might be true but there’s OpenJDK so they still don’t have that as much of an excuse
Minecraft Java edition
It was true until Minecraft 1.17, now it requires at least Java 17
And Microsoft ended up providing their own compiled version of OpenJDK to get around the non-commercial use part of the licence to do it.
Unless you play modded 1.7.10, which has a mod (LWJGL3ify) that has had some sort of ungodly work done to allow it to run with modern java versions.
GregTech: New Horizons is a modpack that famously uses it (and I can confirm the modpack runs better than it has any right to do)
Only reason I still have Java 8 is because Pixelmon is stuck at 1.16.5
Pixelmon has been on 1.20.1+ for quite some time now.. currently it’s on 1.21.1.
That's just the beta, bunch of stuff broken there. The stable version where everything works is still 1.16.5
At least on curseforge the most recent 1.21.1 patch got marked as stable, not sure why on the pixelmon website it is still marked as a beta.
If you rebuild the JVM inside Minecraft is it then Java Minecraft Edition? 🤔
Oracle's incompetence.
I miss SrGrafo…
Where did he go
Still on Reddit I believe.
Should have asked about CoBOL