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I've an old machine running Windows XP 32.

Because Oracle dropped support for WXP 32 bits, I've manually installed the jdk following the awesome answer here:

installing JDK8 on Windows XP - advapi32.dll error

I've however not added it yet to the JAVA_PATH, which is set to jdk 6. I don't know if it would harm or not to add it as well, but I want to be conservative here because a lot of programs in this machine need jdk 6. I don't want to break anything working now.

I'd like to toy around in eclipse to test the new Java 8 features. I've manually added the new jre 8 in the "Installed JREs" section under window -> preferences. In the compiler combo, the highest level available is 1.7 (installed jdk7 some time ago, this time using the official installer, but I still keep java 6 as the default in the system). I don't see any option to add the new level.

Consequently, when creating a new project using the new JRE, a warning is shown saying:

The current workspace uses a 1.4 JRE with compiler compliance level 1.6. This is not recommended and either the JRE or the compiler compliance level should be changed.

Seems a problem derived from the manual installation of the JDK.

I'm using Eclipse Kepler v4.3.1, but I have also tested this in older 3.x install with identical results.

Any help will be appreciated.

Community
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Mister Smith
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1 Answers1

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Support for Java 8 in Eclipse Kepler 4.3.2 is described here. This basically says specify

http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/updates/4.3-P-builds/

as the 'Work with' site on Install New Software and select 'Eclipse Java 8 Support'.

Recent builds of Eclipse 4.4 Luna (since 18 March 2014) have Java 8 support included (but Luna is still under development).

Update: Eclipse Luna (4.4) was released on 25 June 2014

greg-449
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  • I did this and got "not applicable to the current configuration" errors -- turned out in readme_eclipse.html I was running version 3.8. I just went back to Java 7 for now. – Noumenon May 06 '14 at 21:05
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    @Noumenon There will be no further updates to Eclipse 3.x so you will to move to the Eclipse 4.x series for Java 8. Eclipse 4.4 (Luna) is in the final stages of development and should be released on 25th June 2014. – greg-449 May 07 '14 at 06:48