JRuby 9.2 will continue to support Java 8 through the end of the year, and then we'll reevaluate minimum Java version for JRuby 9.3 early in 2019. Maintaining s

JRuby 9.2 will continue to support Java 8 through the end of the year, and then we'll reevaluate minimum Java version for JRuby 9.3 early in 2019. Maintaining support for older JVMs, especially ones that have been officially end-of-lifed, does put a strain on our efforts to keep JRuby current, but I understand the move from 8 to 9/10/11 is a tough pill to swallow. That said...the work we're doing to perform better on Graal will also speed things up on non-Graal JVMs: inlining more code, specializing data structures, reducing call overhead. You can rest assured things will continue to improve on Java 8 as well.