Thinking about moving away from Java 8 (still widely used) to a newer LTS release like Java 17 or 21. Mostly curious about stability, performance improvements, and compatibility concerns. Haven’t encountered major issues with Java 8 yet, but wondering if upgrading is worth the effort. Any experiences or insights from those who’ve made the jump? Also open to general advice on LTS migration strategies.
Thinking about moving from Java 8 to a newer LTS version: what are the pros and cons?
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Moved to Java 17 LTS last year from Java 8 for a mid-sized SaaS project. The biggest wins were the new features like records, sealed classes, and pattern matching—they cut boilerplate significantly and made the codebase much cleaner. Performance-wise, the garbage collection tweaks in G1 gave us noticeable throughput improvements, especially during peak hours. Stability was solid too; we only had one minor hiccup with a third-party library that wasn’t compatible out of the box, but a quick dependency update fixed it.
Was it worth the effort? Absolutely, but plan for testing and dependency checks. The migration itself took a couple of weeks because we had to refactor some legacy patterns and update dependencies. If your project is stable on Java 8, a slow rollout might help avoid surprises.