start thinking about using java8
a. Oracle issued the following more than a year ago
Auto-update Notice and End of Public Updates for Oracle JDK 7
As outlined in the Oracle JDK Support Roadmap, after April 2015, Oracle will not >post further updates of Java SE 7 to its public download sites. Customers who need >continued access to critical bug fixes and security fixes as well as general >maintenance for Java SE 7 or older versions can get long term support through Oracle >Java SE Support. The process of migrating users from Java 7 to Java 8 through the >auto update feature is expected to take place after the January 2015 CPU release.(quoted from http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/eol-135779.html) a. OpenJDK8 has been available in stable debian for quite a while. a. Java8 has matured by now, i.e. there were numerous updates since the first release (cf. here). a. Java8 features like lambdas, streams, easy parallelization, performance improvements for the
java.lang.String(byte[], *)constructor and thejava.lang.String.getBytes()method, parallel array sorting, standard encoding and decoding base64 might be quite useful for metrics-lib in particular.
I think that switching to java8 in Onionoo, metrics-db, and metrics-lib should not pose any problems. I don't know about other projects that might use metrics-lib?
Using the new features could be done step by step, in special java8 branches.
The metrics-lib benchmark code could be integrated in the test codebase for metrics-lib and used for measuring performance.
Nothing very urgent, but it seems a good thing to start thinking about it now.
(And ... Java9 is waiting around the corner ;-)