I sincerely hope Google will upgrade the Dalvik compiler to accept Java 8's syntax. My wishful thinking is that they did not find compelling reasons to upgrade

I sincerely hope Google will upgrade the Dalvik compiler to accept Java 8's syntax. My wishful thinking is that they did not find compelling reasons to upgrade the spec to Java 7 since it did not represent a major upgrade when it comes to the core language. It has some definite improvements over Java 6, but there was no true groundbreaking improvement over older Java versions. At least not to the same degree as generics in Java 5 or now lambdas in Java 8. Besides, Java 8 lambdas should tickle the fancy of Google's engineers. First, it introduces a feature that is already trivially available in Javascript, Python and Go. In addition, remember that Google already develops and heavily uses the Guava library, which introduces the least painful workarounds to use some functional programming in Java, so it seems there is some motivation already. It would be a pitiful split for the Java community if Google does not adapt Java 8. I fully expect that Java 8 lambdas will change the way Java programming is done. If Google stays with a pure imperative Java, it will likely split the ecosystem in two different languages. Java 7 did not introduce enough language features for this to happen, but Java 8 definitely will.