Hi all,
In
https://github.com/eclipse/tm4e/issues/339 , active TM4E contributors have agreed to consider the move the JavaSE-17 as minimal Java version soon. The rationale is that some benefits of recent version of Java languages (sealed Types, switch expressions....) are likely to really facilitate further maintenance and development of the parsers included in TM4E, and also to increase quality (new constructs leave less space for bugs, and often perform better). So we can expect a substantial gain for TM4E future in adopting Java 17 soon.
I'm sharing this with Simultaneous Release channel as TM4E is part of SimRel. At the moment, SimRel targets Java 11. So when TM4E is released with Java 17 requirement, either SimRel allows that and the new release gets in; or SimRel keeps Java 11 requirement and will use an older version of TM4E (for which there would probably have no support given currently active contributors are happy moving to Java 17).
TM4E is used by Wild Web Developer for instance; but Wild Web Developer doesn't mandate 1 specific version of TM4E and we plan to keep TM4E backward compatible in term of behavior and API; so those downstream consumers should be able to work with former (Java 11-able) release as well as newer (Java 17-able) release. So I don't think that downstream consumption should be a main concern.
I would invite SimRel stakeholders to consider is whether/when to allow Java 17-based code in SimRel.
Of course, I would advocate for "Do it right now" especially since JustJ and thus SimRel and EPP packages ships a recent Java; but acknowledge that this may require more discussion, hence why I'm sharing this plan for TM4E early.
Cheers,
