Java 1.8 language features can be used in Java classes only if a Java 1.8 JRE is available. The script compile-java8-code.sh is used only to compile java classes used in the 'test8' unit tests, but these classes are checked into the test8/ directory. Note that unit tests in the test8/ directory will pass (by design) if run against a Java 1.6 or 1.7 JRE, provided that a java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError is caught with the message 'Unsupported major.minor version 52.0' (the expected behavior when Java 1.8 language features are used in an older JRE).