Impact of six month releases

[Ryan Schmitt]

I have similar concerns along these lines. For example, JDK9
introduced the "one plus three back" policy for cross
compilation, such that javac in JDK9 can now only target JDK6
and newer. Under the old release schedule, "one back plus
three" could easily cover a decade's worth of JDKs, but now
that window will shrink to approximately two years. There are
similar questions around JDK deprecations: how long do my
dependencies have to migrate to VarHandles and StackWalker?
Three years or six months? Will we continue to have a new
bytecode version with every release, or will the classfile
format only be incremented as needed?