4 ms·

That is an excellent point too. It always made me wonder why I hear about companies who are running very old versions of Java though. It always seemed like bac

That is an excellent point too. It always made me wonder why I hear about companies who are running very old versions of Java though. It always seemed like backwards compatibility would make keeping up to date with the latest an almost automatic thing.

fpoling 1y ago
Java version updates typically change GC behavior. If one has highly tuned setup there is no guarantee that a newer version would not regress. Another problem is crashes. Java runtime is highly reliable, but still bugs happens.
- Pet_Ant 1y ago
  Are you talking about performance or behaviour? I’ve never seen an issue caused by a GC.
  - fpoling 1y ago
    Latency spikes are the issue. Modern Java mostly solved this, but tuning GC settings is still the thing especially when Java runs on a big server.
josefx 1y ago
It is "mostly" backwards compatible. Applets and everything related to them where dropped. A few interface dependencies where changed to improve modularity of the runtime. Widely used hacks like sun.misc.unsafe are getting replaced with official APIs and locked down. Development of some Java EE packages has been taken over by a third party, so they are no longer packaged within the java namespace. To name just a few of the bigger examples.
kamma4434 1y ago
It is - but you don’t want to find out that something broke because of odd JVM update. If it ain’t broken…