On 2015/4/20 03:53, Blake McBride wrote:

Looking over the ant build (build.xml), it seems like the target and source are set to Java 1.5. Isn't it time we changed it to at least 1.7?

Currently, ABCL targets JRE 5 onwards, which is why we build with these flags set.

Despite the [as of May 2015 Oracle end-of-life pronouncement][1] for all versions of Java prior to JRE 8, many organizations are still using these supposedly EOL platforms for production, so I believe it is important to continue to support them as long it doesn't penalize ABCL somehow on newer JRE platforms.

[1]: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/eol-135779.html

As far as I can determine from reading available documentation, changing the target and source compiler options would not produce any more efficient code for the newer Java platforms. Such a change would only prevent our binary releases from running on EOL platforms.

When we rewrite the compiler to target the JRE 6 verifier or the JRE 7 bytecode support for dynamic method dispatch (aka JSR 292) in the Lisp compiler, then I think it makes sense to revisit this position.

One is of course free to change these options in your local compilations. If anyone can show any changes with different targets, please let us know.