Compatibility

cider-nrepl officially targets Java 8, 11, 17, 21, and the most recent rapid release version (e.g. Java 22). More generally speaking - we aim to support all Java releases that are currently officially supported by Oracle.

cider-nrepl targets Clojure 1.10+. As Clojure doesn’t have the concept of supported releases we have to get a bit creative to determine the minimum version to target.

The minimum required Clojure version is currently derived using data from the State of Clojure survey. In general we consider a Clojure release eligible for dropping once its usage drops bellow 5%, but we’d not drop support for any release just for the sake of doing it. We’d do it only if this would lessen the maintenance burden or open up the possibility for big nREPL improvements.

Currently we apply the same policy for Clojure and ClojureScript support.

cider-nrepl supports nREPL 0.6+.

Below you can find the official compatibility matrix for cider-nrepl. For a very long time the project targeted nREPL 0.2.x, but the requirements were bumped to nREPL 0.6 in recent versions.

cider-nrepl is under active development and breaking changes might happen from time to time. That being said, we’re well aware that these days many editors and other Clojure development tools rely on cider-nrepl and we’re fully committed to avoid introducing painful breakages there.

Most tools authors using cider-nrepl are involved with its development in some capacity, so we’re always considering carefully any proposed breaking change and the impact it would have.

It’s extremely unlikely that we’re going to break compatibility on the protocol level ever (with the rare cases of changing/removing things that existed, but we knew for a fact weren’t used). Most often backwards compatibility would be broken on the implementation level - usually extracting something out of cider-nrepl to the orchard library.