Hello everyone, Starting this thread to discuss, if and when, we can drop Java 8 support. We have been fully supporting Java 11 and Java 17 for a while now. Anyone, who is looking to upgrade Druid, can safely select either of these LTS Java runtimes. There are a few important reasons to drop Java 8 support
- It adds extra burden on build/test pipelines to test all these different runtimes. We want to shrink this matrix of Java runtime and test suites. - Being on Java 8 will block us from upgrading dependencies that have dropped Java 8 support. We can get around it by building profiles and shims but it adds more complexity. One example is pac4j which is Java 11 based from 5.x. - As we drop support for older Java releases, developers can use the features offered by the more advanced Java versions.
