Open
Description
Currently we support Java 8 for compilation. Java 8 was released in 2014 and was superseded by Java 11 in 2018. Continuing to support it imposes constraints: relatively trivial ones like avoiding var
and certain newer APIs, but also more serious ones like not being able to reference module APIs except through reflection.
We should drop Java 8 support and require a compiler that is at least Java 11. Users will still be able to compile into Java 8 classfiles with --release 8
. (They can even use --release 7
.)