We ditched spock because of groovy, and never looked back. Now at jdk 21, previously at 20.
One year ago, Gpars already supported Virtual Threads: https://groovy.apache.org/blog/gpars-meets-virtual-threads
As a heavy user of Groovy/Spock, though, I agree that upgrading Groovy itself can be challenging, unfortunately. Really depends though on how many edgy Groovy features you relied on :).
We only used it for Spock AFAIR.
Spring supports new JDK release ("minor version" like you called them, those between 11 and 17 and 21) before release. The only exception was with JDK 13, there was about 2 week slip there.
Lombok (I don't like it) supports every such version at release (not before unfortunately).
Other libs didn't even error out (we keep them at newest versions possible, aside from Jakarta madness).
So from the major libs/frameworks, the only thing that slowed us down was groovy.
This is a moot point because your the build execution and the project compile/run can be on different JDKs. It is a tiny amount of configuration to decouple them, e.g. to use an EA build.
But Groovy does indeed not work, or has support very late for releases between 8, 11, 17 and 21 - so for anyone that wants to stay current (and not wait 3 or 2 years), using groovy in your code will be a pain - that might be also possible for other JVM languages, but I don't know, haven't used them.
"Gradle now supports using Java 21 for compiling, testing, and starting other Java programs. This can be accomplished using toolchains. Currently, you cannot run Gradle on Java 21 because Kotlin lacks support for JDK 21. However, support for running Gradle with Java 21 is expected in future versions."
https://docs.gradle.org/8.4-rc-1/release-notes.html#support-...
