Supported JDKs

[Michael Prentice]

Are the GPL v2 JDKs at https://jdk.java.net/ supported? Or do you only support the commercially licensed JDKs from Oracle (https://java.com/) as linked in your GitHub README.md?

[Nick Reid]

I believe our support guarantees for Java are more in terms of language versions than specific JVM implementations. If a JVM is a valid implementation of the language standard, we would expect Closure Compiler to work. I'm not aware of any dependencies on vendor-specific features.

Generally speaking, we test against a recent-ish version of OpenJDK.

If a bug were discovered in a particular VM that affected Closure Compiler, we would likely accept a PR to work around the issue, assuming the burden of maintaining that PR was justified.

I should also be clear that Closure Compiler's support platforms are dictated primarily by Google's internal needs. Supporting additional platforms costs development resources and increases complexity. Platforms that are not in use at Google (or a large slice of the external community) are not likely to receive support work, and in some cases will be actively unsupported, where they conflict with other requirements.