Java 8 / Java 11 support timeline in gRPC?

[Dane Pitkin]

Hello,

Has there been any discussion or decision on how long Java 8 and Java 11 will be supported in gRPC? This closed issue[1] suggests support for both will be dropped in September 2023 when Java 21 is released, but I'm not sure if this is still planned.

Thanks!

[1] https://github.com/grpc/grpc-java/issues/9386

[Eric Anderson]

Yeah... It's been hard to have clear messaging here, because we've been trying to figure it out. The messaging is mostly avoiding over-promising, but where "in practice" fits in is still murky.

gRFC P5 says we could have "dropped" Java 8 already. That's obviously not happened. v1.57.0 did have the oops for Java 8, but that was an accident due to tooling dropping Java 8 support. That "oops" was pretty useful as many Java 8 users noticed very soon after the release, which is a strong demonstrator of interest. Upstream Java 11 becomes security-only support at the end of the month, and I'm already seeing tooling drop it, so we're probably going to have to use Java 17 for release builds soon (still with support for Java 8).

"dropped" is not the right word. Even after we drop Java 8 from master, we'd keep a branch alive for it. And as long as people remain interested in it we can have fixes and releases. Given the community discussions I've heard, I don't think interest in Java 8 will die before Temurin's Nov 2026 (currently promised) support ends. Google at least looks like it would remain interested to that point (Sept vs Nov is basically the same at this distance).

The thing I don't know is at which point Java 8 is dropped from master, and stops seeing new features. Earlier this year I knew "we'd wait at least until September," so that Java 8 and 11 would share a branch. But now that we're here in September... ??? Probably sometime between 6 months from now and 2026...

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