JAVA 1.6 in Eclipse IDE

Question

I am unable to change the compiler to Java SE 1.6 in Eclipse as the option is not shown in the change compiler menu. When I try to look for it in the compiler options, it cannot be found:

When I select it from the "Execution Environments", the application just closes automatically and the compiler still shows 23.

Answer 1

Java 6 has been released in 2006, there are no public updates for these JDKs any more and people aren't really using it any more. Even javac only supports compiling Java 8 or higher with more recent JDKs. If someone is still using JDK 6 in production, they should (probably) have updated years ago.

This resulted in Eclipse dropping support for compiling for Java 7 and below in Eclipse 2024-09. You can find the release notes here.

When writing Java code, you likely want to use the latest version with LTS support from vendors which is 25 at the moment unless you have a very good reason to use an older version. If you want to use Java 8 for example, you can still do that with the latest Eclipse versions.

If you really want to write code for Java 6, you can use Eclipse 2024-06.