Upgrade to 1.9.3.1

yeah, Java 9/10 support is poor even in today, and they didn’t add anything as useful as lambdas, so stick with java 8 is never a big problem.

However, with lambdas, Java 8 is a completely different language. Lambdas gain more optimizations (e.g. omitting unnecessary object allocation) comparing to anonymous class, and with lambdas you can avoid several unnecessary boxing and unboxing which is unreasonably slow, so yes, they give more speed; Lambdas remove several crufts in Java development prior to lambdas, resulting cleaner and more readable code, so yes they give robustness.

I personally relay on lambdas heavily for cleaner and more readible code, but with customized build scripts, I can easily transpile my code to java 7, so moving on is not much beneficial for me. But it’s not easy to setup such a build script, so for other people, especially new-comers, they will never have a chance to use lambdas in robocode development. They will even be scared and despaired by the fact that their bot can not run on roborumble, even with Java 8.

By not moving on to robocode 1.9.2.6+, we are wasting a large part of effort of moving to java 8. With the better bot list update mechanism, I think it’s definitely time to move on.