this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2024
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[–] [email protected] 76 points 2 weeks ago (60 children)

Can anyone who's actually dealt with Java tell me how much Anon is exaggerating?

[–] schteph 28 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Java is religiously backwards compatible. Modern java projects are not as enterprisey and boilerplatey, but, as jdk21 is backwards compatible with jdk1.3, you can still happily write code as if it's 2003.

Additionally, the java space is huge, so just wildly googling will probably not help you that much.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

On the other hand back in Java 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4 days you frequently had companies install a specific patch level version because their applications worked only with that patch level. That was back when Java was actually popular for some reason.

[–] Hawke 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Is that why every single application will only work with some ancient version of Java?(usually 8, sometimes 1.6 or 11)

I can’t think of many cases where Java 21 is a drop in replacement, and I don’t think anyone actually used 17.

[–] pivot_root 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

That's entirely the fault of applications (or more likely their libraries) using internal APIs or JNI. As long as it isn't doing anything screwy with reflection and class loading or using the sun.* packages that aren't part of the language specification, Java bytecode compiled for ancient Java versions will still work on modern versions.

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