Dani Megert, the project lead for the Java development tools (JDT) project made this announcement earlier today:
The Eclipse top-level project is very proud to announce official support for Java™ 8. Starting with I20140318-0830 all Luna (4.4) builds contain the Eclipse support for Java™ 8. For Kepler SR2 (4.3.2) a feature patch is available. For future builds visit our downloads page.
The Java™ 8 support contains the following:
- Eclipse compiler implements all the new Java™ 8 language enhancements.
- Significant features, like Search and Refactoring, have been updated – to support Java™ 8.
- Quick Assist and Clean Up to migrate anonymous class creations to lambda expressions and back.
- New formatter options for lambdas.
Note that PDE API Tools has not yet adopted the new language constructs. This will be completed in the final Luna release.
Big thanks to everyone who worked on this effort!
Congratulations to the team!
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Great job – perfectly aligned with the official JDK8 GA release.
o Yeah!!! Thank u guys. You are the best
Java 8 features doesn’t work for me, and downloaded eclipse yesterday, also downloaded the jdk.
Look here: https://waynebeaton.wordpress.com/2014/03/26/add-java-8-support-to-eclipse-kepler/
Why do I have to come here to find out how to get Java 8 Support? Why does 4.3.2 not list any update when I check for them? Why is m2e not updated yet? Most bigger projects use Maven these days (including eclipse) and there is no support yet? The two other major IDEs have had Java 8 support for much longer (granted, they don’t have their own compiler, but come on..) and the update experience was way (!!) smoother.
It seems like the added (and probably unnecessary) complexity by using / inventing OSGi as your platform does not benefit the update process in any way (usally its the opposite: new major or minor eclipse update? Have fun reinstalling all your plugins and setting up the IDE again).
This is really sad.
I would prefer to congratulate all of you on getting the update out (somewhat) in time but i had to go through so much trouble just to get this working (as, sadly, usual with eclipse and m2e) that I really don’t feel like it. I hope there will be some changes made in the future (espacially in User Experience) to make eclipse a feasible option again. Currently all other IDEs destroy in eclipse in terms of UX.
That’s quite a list.
The availability of Java 8 support in Eclipse was pretty low ceremony. I didn’t help matters by neglecting to notice that I hadn’t copied and pasted the link to the instructions.
My experiences using OSGi, especially with the consolidated repositories of the simultaneous release and the Marketplace Client have been completely positive. I’ll admit that I’m disappointed that we’re not better able to leverage the hot replace functionality of OSGi. Restarting after installing features sucks.
I downloaded and installed this luna release and I find this post and the press release very misleading. The support for JDK 1.8 is not there. Although it allows you to have a 1.8 JDK to compile and run the code, you cannot change the source level to 1.8. I have read various posts on the internet from people claiming that you can change the preferences file by hand to 1.8 but I have also found this to be false. Why announce it if it isn’t ready?
If you download an build later than March 18, it should have the Java 8 support in it. I’ve been playing with the Eclipse 4.4 nightly build from March 24 and it works fine.
I made a mistake when I copy and pasted Dani’s message; I didn’t include the link to the instructions. They’re here:
https://wiki.eclipse.org/JDT/Eclipse_Java_8_Support_For_Kepler
I’ve addressed this better in a follow up post: