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It's common to require a certain old Java version or newer. In general Java is extremely backward compatible.

There have been a few minor breaking changes from JDK 8 to JDK 17, but the worst ones have had command-line options to disable them.

Maybe you're referring to JEE and/or specific "enterprise" software which does tend to move much more slowly.



I’ve run into several performance regressions from 8 -> 11 -> beyond

Code still worked but services would easily get overloaded, there would be one piece of code which ran crazy slow, or new memory issues would come up.

It absolutely is not just safe to jump versions in production, usually it’s been weeks of testing finding and fixing perf bugs.


Yes, what you describe is entirely believable. And one of the legitimate reasons why enterprise software is slow to upgrade.


This really hasn't been consistent with my experience as an end user. I have POS software that will blow up if any POS terminal applies a minor point release update on any terminal. I have current PMS software from Oracle that will infinitely NullPointerException if upgrade to a currently supported version of Oracle's JRE. It's going back a few years but I remember backups being unreadable if you upgraded JRE on a Backup Exec server.




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