Java 8 end-of-life

[bensku]

I do not like removing or deprecating major features (cough Minecraft 1.9 cough) without some warning time. So, here it goes:

Java 8 is end-of-life in January 2019. After that, most users will not get bug fixes, security patches or any other updates from Oracle. They should migrate to either Java 10 or (preferably) 11.

For Skript, this means that releases made after January may not support Java 8. After all, running a server on top of unsupported, insecure, Java version would be a bad idea.

Edit: Corrected a few dates. Note that these apply only to Oracle JRE; most Linux distros ship OpenJDK which might have different support lifecycle.

[28andrew]

Seems like Java 8 is getting LTS updates until 2019. I'm down for migrating Skript to Java 10 or 11. Hopefully Mojang makes Minecraft Java Edition use Java 10+ by then so server hosting providers are forced to update.

[bensku]

Seems that I looked at outdated roadmap. Java 8 is getting a few more months of updates than I thought. I'll update the original post.

Note that it seems unclear if some random OpenJDK builds you have will get security fixes on Java 8 after Java 11 is released. Be sure to check it if you're not running Oracle's build.

@Matsjee I was a couple of months early with the date. It is also not likely that we'll start building for Java 11 immediately. Still, I see no reason to support insecure software; we'll eventually move on, after Java 8 is EOL.

[Nicofisi]

Does Spigot work fine on Java 10 right now? Just curious

[bensku]

I have not noticed any issues. It is possible that some plugins do not work well. Also, Minecraft client doesn't really work with Java 9+ as far as I know. However, Mojang usually ships Java for players, so that is their problem.

[AyhamAl-Ali]

End of life of this issue maybe? Since Skript requires Java 16 for compilation now but runs on older Java versions

[TPGamesNL]

Skript only requires Java 16 for compilation, runtime still allows Java 8 therefore we cannot use any features from Java 9+

[TheLimeGlass]

@TPGamesNL I don't think we need to have this as an active issue? What is it representing, we recommend Java 12+ more or so Java 17+ but we still compile to Java 8 as Skript still supports 1.13-1.16 which can run on Java 8.

[TPGamesNL]

The issue is about dropping support for Java 8 (or switching to a higher target Java version), which is still a possibility even if we keep supporting 1.13 - 1.16, because 1.13 - 1.16 runs on Java 11 as well.

[Moderocky]

Java 8 support will be dropped in favour of Java 11 as of Skript 2.9.
As Java 11 is also past its end-of-life, we will be dropping that in favour of Java 17 in future.