Hi everyone, I wanted to start a discussion around the future of Java 8 support in TinkerPop. Reports have shown a sharp decline in Java 8 usage in recent years, as developers are migrating to more modern versions.
I’d like to propose that as a first step towards modernising java in TinkerPop, that we drop support for building with JDK8 in the master branch and move the build to a minimum of JDK11. At this time, I would suggest that we still configure the build with `--release 8` such that a Java 8 runtime will still be supported. If there are no objections to this proposal, I plan to open a PR with such a change in the coming days. Sometime in the future, I would like to also stop targeting a Java 8 release such that we can begin to make use of more modern Java language features, however I don’t believe we are ready for such a change at the moment. I may revisit this topic prior to the release of TinkerPop 4 if reports Java 8 usage continues to fall at a significant rate. Please let me know any thoughts or opinions on the future of Java 8 support in TinkerPop. Thanks, Cole Greer
