zlacker

Nope, the closest thing to a a breaking javalang change is adding new keywords like var. Outside of the language itself, java's standard libraries have undergone some depreciations and packaging moves (moving javafx, etc.), but absolutely nothing like breaking core language constructs, syntax or behaviors across revisions. I would expect standard libraries to have some deprecations across a 20+ year span.

However, I'm of the opinion that "standard libraries" should be much more minimalist and than javas: move as much as you can into a "core" library that isn't necessarily part of the language, just an optional runtime component following semver so you can be sure pinning a major version will work for essentially forever. Java isn't perfect in this regard, but it sure as hell better than what perl, ruby and python have done in significantly less time than javas...