Java 8 autoboxing + generics: different behaviour with variable vs. method

Question

I found a piece of code that after switching from Java 7 to Java 8 stopped compiling. It does not feature any of the new Java 8 stuff like lambda or streams.

I narrowed

Answer 1

This seems to be a known issue of the Oracle compiler: Bug ID: JDK-8162708

Quote:

A DESCRIPTION OF THE PROBLEM :
If you have a method in a generic class declared as follow:

class Foo {
  public T getValue() {
    // returns a value ...
  }
}

and you call the method above inside a ternary operator as follow

Foo foo = new Foo<>();
Float f = new Random().nextBoolean() ? foo.getValue() : 0f;

you get a syntax error from the javac 1.8 compiler.

But the code above compiles with no errors and warnings with both javac 1.7 and 1.9.

Resolution: Unresolved

Affected Versions: 8

From the Comments:

This issue is only applicable to 8u, there is no issue in 7 and 9