The m2e project, a key component of the most popular Eclipse packages (IDE for Java Developers and IDE for Java EE Developers), requires Java 8.

To ship any Eclipse packages with an outdated Jetty or without the Help system pre-installed would be a major detriment.

Eclipse Help system relies on Jetty, which itself requires Java 8 in its latest (and safest) release.

If the Eclipse Platform starts looking old-fashioned and lame (and forbidding new language features puts us at risk of looking so), weвЂ™d risk losing contributors (which the Platform really needs). ItвЂ™s true we have to cater to users, but we also have to cater to the contributors. Its architecture is pluggablethere is a core IDE component and many different plugins can be added to it. It is quite popular for developing many different types of Java applications. This is a difference compared to Java 7 which just updated the libraries but not the language. Eclipse is an open source IDE for developing applications in many different programming languages.

Java 8 introduces some interesting new language features which some contributors canвЂ™t wait to use.

Furthermore, all major versions of Java before 8 are officially end-of-life as of April, 2015 they will no longer receive public updates, making them security risks.

By the time 4.6/Neon ships, Java 8 will be 2 years old (so no one can call that 'bleeding edge').

In terms of security fixes, itвЂ™s safer than Java 7 (for example, TLS v1.2 is only enabled in Java 8 by default).

Java 8 is available today on all major Platforms (including Linux-ARM for example) and by multiple JRE vendors.

In the end, a few hard requirements to make useful packages tipped the scales. There was open discussion in the Platform and EPP communities about this decision. As of Eclipse Platform 4.6, and the Neon release, a Java 8 (or later) JRE or JDK is required to run Eclipse.

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