Java 8 in ftc_app?

[alex.fanat]

Hello All,
I am just wondering if it would be allowed for programmers to make use of the Jack Toolchain or the new Android Studio 3.0 Preview 1 with the ftc_app project in order to take advantage of new Java 8 features, such as Lambda Expression support. For anyone wondering, this would be important for my team because we have set up an event-and-handler-driven functionality implementation model which makes use of interfaces. In Java 7, implementing these interfaces inline is very tedious, as it not only creates messy-looking code, but also takes up a lot of document space and calls for lots of boilerplate; in Java 8 it would be far easier and faster. As far as I know, it should work; however, I have not seen it mentioned anywhere in the forums or game manual, so I was wondering if it was just disallowed or there is some other reason it wouldn't be possible. Thanks in advance!

https://developer.android.com/studio...8-support.html
http://tools.android.com/tech-docs/jackandjil

[4634 Programmer]

I see no reason why it wouldn't be allowed, however, you need to be running Android Nougat or higher to actually run Java 8 code.

[4634 Programmer]

As a workaround, there is this library for lambdas: https://github.com/evant/gradle-retrolambda

Alternatively, you could consider using Kotlin

[alex.fanat]

I see no reason why it wouldn't be allowed, however, you need to be running Android Nougat or higher to actually run Java 8 code.

Are we allowed to run Nougat for the competition?

[GearTicks]

I see no reason why it wouldn't be allowed, however, you need to be running Android Nougat or higher to actually run Java 8 code.

I don't believe this is the case. We used Java 8 last year with the Moto G2 phones, which only run Marshmallow. We had to set targetSdkVersion to 23 and sourceCompatibility and targetCompatibility to JavaVersion.VERSION_1_8 in build.common.gradle, as well as add this inside defaultConfig:
jackOptions {
enabled true
}

[4634 Programmer]

I don't believe this is the case. We used Java 8 last year with the Moto G2 phones, which only run Marshmallow. We had to set targetSdkVersion to 23 and sourceCompatibility and targetCompatibility to JavaVersion.VERSION_1_8 in build.common.gradle, as well as add this inside defaultConfig:
jackOptions {
enabled true
}

Well, it looks like we're both half right. If you look at this table, you'll see that some Java 8 features require Nougat, (API24) and some don't