Thanks everyone for your feedback! I got replies from users who are still stuck to older versions of the JRE (even Java 6 and, thus, BaseX 7.9 is still used), but it seems that the majority of you is looking forward to the upgrade.

I am glad to report that the first Java 8 snapshot is available for testing now [1]. Please don’t hesitate to give it a try.

Have fun, Christian

[1] http://files.basex.org/releases/latest/