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kotlinlang

Our Android project uses Java 8. Does Kotlin or compiling our project benefit at all if we upgrade to Java 11?

I think if you target Java 11 on the Kotlin side, it will be able to optimize the byte code slightly more, but I can’t find a source on this anymore. Just vague memories.

&gt;  If you want to make use of optimizations available in newer versions of Java, you can explicitly specify the target Java version from 9 to 19.
I see this from <https://kotlinlang.org/docs/faq.html#which-versions-of-jvm-does-kotlin-target|here>, I wonder what optimizations there are?

I’d imagine there’s more things that are guaranteed in a Java 11 runtime than a Java 8 runtime, as there’s more time for the runtime maintainers to implement changes.

The latest new bytecode instruction to my knowledge is invokedynamic in Java 7.

if your minSdk is not &gt;= 26, d8 will desugar invokedynamic back to lambda classes anyway

the biggest benefit IMO is being able to freely use newer libraries. you can't use an `inline fun` from a library that was built with Java 11 bytecode in a project that targets Java 8

desugaring supports a growing number of Java 11 APIs as well, <https://developer.android.com/studio/write/java11-minimal-support-table> <https://developer.android.com/studio/write/java11-default-support-table> <https://developer.android.com/studio/write/java11-nio-support-table>

If we upgrade to Java 11, do we still need to desugar to get the `java.time` package?

for Android, yes. there's a difference between the bytecode target and the APIs available at runtime

but note that the desugared `java.time` is missing various localization features as compared the real implementation, due to limitations of older SDKs

Is there anything bad that could happen when we upgrade to java 11 from 8?

Are you using any of the java.security functions? Those tend to be the main thing I see break when upgrading.

```            val hasher = MessageDigest.getInstance("SHA-256")
            val hash = hasher.digest(data.toByteArray(Charsets.UTF_8))
            return Base64.encodeToString(hash, Base64.NO_WRAP)```

on Android, those would break on SDK changes and not Java target changes anyway (<https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/security/cryptography#deprecated-functionality>)