Are these companies willing to sponsor JDK 8 support? If they derive
value from ABCL it's only fair.

On Fri, Oct 30, 2020 at 5:34 PM Blake McBride <blake@mcbride.name> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Oct 30, 2020 at 6:35 AM Mark Evenson <evenson@panix.com> wrote:
>>
>>     ABCL 1.8.0
>>
>>     Under the gathering storms of the Fall 2020, we are pleased to
>>     release ABCL 1.8.0 as the Ninth major revision of the
>>     implementation.
>>
>>     This Ninth Edition of the implementation now supports building and
>>     running on the recently released openjdk15 platform.  This release
>>     is intended as the last major release to support the openjdk6,
>>     openjdk7, and openjdk8 platforms, for with abcl-2.0.0 we intend to
>>     move the minimum platform to openjdk11 or better in order to
>>     efficiently [implement atomic memory compare and swap
>>     operations][github/issues/92].
>
>
> My company uses JDK8 and every company I've consulted with still uses JDK8.  I have no plans to switch anytime soon and nor do any of the the companies I've consulted with as far as I know.   Rather than forcing me to move from JDK8, your exclusion of JDK8 will simply cause me to stop upgrading ABCL.
>
> According to Wikipedia, Oracle extended support of JDK8 ends in 2030.  Support for JDK11 ends in 2026.  Other companies like Azul plan to support JDK8 for many years to come.
>
> Is it really critical for you to drop JDK8?
>
> Thanks.
>
> Blake McBride
>