This is very true, the Sony vs Bleem and Virtual Game Station lawsuit set precedent and made Emulators legal. Roms in the other hand are not legal, but for what I have heard Game companies are too afraid that the case of Bleem and Virtual Game Station to be repeated that they prefer to not file lawsuit and make copyright claims to websites that upload roms.
In this case is clearly stated if you read the report as xCloud, not Gamepass. Even they metion about the latency, and metion as competetitors Nvidia Geforce Now and Playstation Now
Microsoft have in 2021 the 60-70% of global cloud gaming services representing 1-3% of the gaming industry. Is true that this number have been growing, but anyway the reasons that are using is backed by the idea that ultimately the Cloud Gaming Services will take over all the industry. But this is just especulation, and probably even if this is true this would happen even without Microsoft buying Activision.
I think that the main problem upgrading beyond Java 8 is Java 9 and module system and a lot of javax package classes that were removed. It will be very helpful a tool that can detect what modules or classes that are being used by your codebase and add them as maven or gradle dependencies and add them to the classpath.
As Clojure programmer, i tell you that you should, because any moment Java introduce new features libraries will start using and most Clojure libraries are Java libraries wrappers.
In addition if you want to use these new Java libraries in case and Clojure does not catch up with new Java features the ergonomics of using Java libraries with clojure decrease.
And still they are trying to figure out how Ifn Clojure interface with Java functional interfaces.
Also when Project Loom lands on JVM it will benefit Clojure too, allowing to remove code for instance of Clojure futures.
If Clojure catch up with Value classes can increase performance of Clojure too.
But this disregard of Java features or improvements is the kind of Clojure developer so content of what he have that forgots that can get better things.
I have the feeling that after Nubank bought Cognitech, Clojure has gone to stagnation. I mean, i feel that promoting and improving Clojure is no longer a priority. And another think that stinks me everytime Cognitech talks about Clojure they have to bring to the table Datomic. They tried to push Datomic on my company long time ago when they do some consultancy job at my company. You can skip all the talk, because is all about how good Clojure is and that is. No any eta about future features, improvements and fix problems of current Clojure users.
Lot of open source contributors have leave the community, because there is any plan on Clojure. I guess that Rick Hickey is happy with Clojure as it is now, and this is the way is going to stay. And still no Java 8 support for CompletableFuture, lambdas interface, Stream api, java.time, no pattern matching, java records, this group feels like a group of old programmers stuck at Java 6 that cannot move forward.
For me, protocols i tend to not use it, because it makes it harder to understand the code and Cursive cannot find instances that implements the protocols.
For testing purposes is easier to redef a function than implementing a full new test protocol.
Well, i have to add having developing in a Clojure shop that starting to develop a new feature with Clojure is easier than Kotlin, you don't have to care almost about of the shape of the data. But later, this is a pain, you need a lot of discipline to document because you would look back at this code a who knows what data are you receiving.
In addition i have to say, that a lot of libraries are falling into clj-commons because the original developers no longer works on the project, other like compojure, that is mentioned in the blog post last stable release is from 2016 and version 2 is in alpha since then.
I am curious why are you using c3p0 on 2022 when hikaricp is being maintained, and last release of c3p0 is from 2019. Also no support for R2DBC.
My impression is that in the last 2 years, the ecosystem has shrink, less talks, less new libraries, new libraries that are no longer maintained.
Others problems arise is that Clojure lag a bit with compatibility with new Java features, still i think Clojure cannot pass Clojure functions as parameter to Java functions. It results in awkwardly having to reify Java function interface to pass function when using a Java library. No conversion from Java 8 CompletableFuture to clojure async primitives in 2022. And i think they not going to support it in the near future.
What i am saying is that Java is in the future, and Clojure is in the past. They just cannot catch with new Java features and i doubt they are going to support it ever. You can still run it on modern jvm because they update the bytecode but that is all.