> Of course, that would be incompatible with one of the possible approaches to https://github.com/google/guava/issues/3990, which is to use --release.

[cpovirk]

          > Of course, that would be incompatible with one of the possible approaches to https://github.com/google/guava/issues/3990, which is to use `--release`.

Well, not completely: We could use --release 8 but then perform a second compilation with (e.g.) --release 11 to put a second set of classes into a multi-release jar. Even though multi-release jars don't do one of the things we might like, I think they could work well here. We could even imagine conditionally using APIs like CRC32C internally by providing an exception-throwing implementation for Java 8 in addition to a "real" implementation for newer versions and then making sure to perform appropriate checks before using the implementation class.

Originally posted by @cpovirk in #6549 (comment)