We’ve made a couple of Saxon 12 releases where we (once intentionally, once accidentally) built the Java release without support for JDK 8. Users noticed.
We’re starting to think about Saxon 13 and we’re definitely planning to move the minimum Java version forward. There are still a few years left in JDK 8 extended service support, but our build tools are beginning to issue deprecation warnings for it.
JDK 8 was released more than a decade ago. There have been a lot of Java language improvements in the intervening years and we’re starting to take advantage of some of them.
It makes sense to choose a “long term service” (LTS) release. We’ll want to avoid changing the version during maintenance releases. The Java LTS releases are 11, 17, 21, and 25. Premier support for 11 has already ended and version 25 was only released last month, that’s probably too aggressive.
That leaves 17 or 21. We’re leaning towards Java 17, but we’d welcome any thoughts you might have.