Hi, Scala team lead at Lightbend here (I left academia in 2012 to lead the team). We dropped Java 6 because we did not anticipate any business case for it, based on surveying our customers (we have continued to monitor the adoption of Java 8 amongst our customers, and everyone is upgrading, save for android).
We did consider (and regret) potentially leaving android behind, but we were (perhaps naively) hoping that something like retrolambda would suffice, or that android would catch up. In any case, it doesn't make a lot of sense to have 2.12 still support Java 6, since most of its features require Java 8 (those that don't, we first implemented in 2.11.x).
As announced in http://scala-lang.org/news/2.12-roadmap/, we will continue to support 2.11 for a bit longer than most releases, and we welcome community backports of 2.12 features that you'd like to see in 2.11.
> We did consider (and regret) potentially leaving android behind, but we were (perhaps naively) hoping that something like retrolambda would suffice, or that android would catch up. In any case, it doesn't make a lot of sense to have 2.12 still support Java 6, since most of its features require Java 8 (those that don't, we first implemented in 2.11.x).
Presumably 2.11 won't be supported going forward? Or as someone who would like my libraries to work on android and doesn't particularly care about them being callable from Java 8, should I just stay on 2.11 indefinitely?
Yes, if you're tied to Java 6, you're also tied to Scala 2.11. Why is the former version peg ok but not the latter? We do everything we can to enable 2.11.x maintenance by the community (and contributions are trending up!), as well as doing some of our own -- time permitting. If you'd like to get commercial support, we do offer that to our customers.
> Yes, if you're tied to Java 6, you're also tied to Scala 2.11. Why is the former version peg ok but not the latter?
a) Java 6 is forward binary compatible with later versions
b) Google has a reasonable excuse in terms of the Oracle lawsuit. Don't get me wrong, I'm not happy about Android being stuck on Java 6, but there are extenuating circumstances.
c) Scala 2.11 has issues that affect me and I want to see fixed. Java 6 doesn't, at least not that I've noticed. (If JVM 8 were necessary to the implementation of a Scala feature I cared about I would understand that, but as far as I can see it's irrelevant to my use cases)
Yes, but from a "business" standpoint, Java 6 hasn't EOL'd. If your business needs to build Android applications, it doesn't matter that it's technically EOL'd.
I would guess there's probably quite a few VB6 applications out there in business-land, and it's been EOL'd since 2012 IIRC. Not that most people would want to deal with them, but they exist, just like Java 6 in Android.
In addition to being supported by the community, we (Lightbend) offer commercial support for Scala 2.11. If you're paying Oracle for Java 6 support beyond its EOL, perhaps you'd be willing to establish a commercial relationship with us as well? That said, the vast majority of our customers are eagerly upgrading to Java 8 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7346224, https://info.lightbend.com/COLL-2014-10-20-Java-8-II-Survey-...)
