DISCLAIMER: These notes are from the defunct k8 project which precedes SquirrelJME. The notes for SquirrelJME start on 2016/02/26! The k8 project was effectively a Java SE 8 operating system and as such all of the notes are in the context of that scope. That project is no longer my goal as SquirrelJME is the spiritual successor to it.
11:06
For building on ancient systems I can have a translator compiler which translates source code from Java 8 down to Java 5 for compilation. Java 6 however would be easier to support, however GCJ is at the Java 5 level. What I could do instead in the future is just when I have an actual Java 8 compiler written in Java 8, I can use a source translation to translate the Java 8 compiler down to Java 5 and then bootstrap everything including a simple (and slow) VM written purely in Java.