What @tcrayford said.

It’s a mess - I never thought Oracle would be able to manage Java worse than Apple.

But they’ve done a stellar job at it.

IntelliJ 15 comes with a bundled JDK8, but whether it works well is hardware dependent - I have to turn it off since it doesn’t work with my mid-2012 rMBP

Well, it does work, but is unstable and slow.

But the bundled JDK will never work with IntelliJ versions < 15

@ghadi: The only issue is that I can’t use a version of Clojure that relies on JDK > 6 for the code that runs Cursive itself.

The code for apps developed in IntelliJ/Cursive can use whatever version they like.

So if Clojure 1.9 drops JDK6 support I’ll be on JDK8 for a couple of years, I guess, and just add patches I need to my fork.

To be clear, we have not even started discussing Clojure 1.9 yet, so there is no plan either way.

Does the same solution not cover both problems? Have an opt-in flag for indy support, off by default so that it doesn't give Colin or all N of the Android folks a hard time but server side users can opt into it for performance. Similarly have at least an all or nothing opt-in flag to enable static linking so that in the same spirit existing with-redefs code and compiler monkeying continues to work but users can opt into the static linking behavior if they accept its tradeoffs. I suppose you could argue that ^:static is opt-in and really what you want is a global opt-out rather than ^:static being a noop that can be "turned on" but either would work. But this feels like stating the obvious so maybe this has been discussed and discarded already. I can't tell since there doesn't seem to be a design page on the wiki or a feature tracking JIRA ticket, just the changelog entry.