Tomasz Godzik, VirtusLab & Scala Core Team
We recently asked for community input on changing the JDK version used by the Scala 3 compiler. We now thank everyone for their input and announce the decision: JDK 17 will be the new minimum, starting with Scala 3.8 minor and the subsequent new LTS which will mostly likely be Scala 3.9.
Why drop 8?
Our reasoning for dropping 8 was presented in this previous blog post.
Why drop 11?
The discussion on whether to also drop 11 didn’t uncover any compelling reason not to leave JDK 11 behind. 11 is now nearly as antiquated as 8, and moving from 11 to 17 is not normally considered a difficult upgrade for users. 17 offers useful APIs and VM features. In the JVM world, requiring 17+ is already a mainstream position and is becoming more so with every passing month. Also, we increase Scala’s minimum so rarely, we feel we should take this chance to aid open-source maintainers by reducing the testing and maintenance burden across the entire Scala 3 tooling and library ecosystems as much as we reasonably can.
The open discussion that led to this decision can be found at the Scala contributors forum.
What about Scala 3.3 LTS?
This change only concerns future minor versions of Scala 3. In particular, the Scala 3.3 LTS line is unaffected by this change. Scala 3.3.x releases will continue for at least a year after the new LTS line begins.
What about Scala 2?
There are no plans to change Scala 2’s JDK support. It will continue being built using JDK 8, as before.