java - Gradle, "sourceCompatibility" vs "targetCompatibility"?

Question

What is the relationship/difference between sourceCompatibility and targetCompatibility? What happens when they are set to different values?

According to Gradle documentation:

sourceCompatibility is "Java version compatibility to use when compiling Java source." targetCompatibility is "Java version to generate classes for."

My understanding is that targetCompatibility will generate java bytecode that is compatible with a specific version of Java, is this a subset of the functionality of sourceCompatibility?

Answer 1

targetCompatibility and sourceCompatibility maps to -target release and -source release in javac. Source is basically the source language level and target is the level of the bytecode that is generated.

More details can be found in the javac the cross compilation section.