Hi all, We’re getting close to the 12.0 release and nb-javac won’t be available at the time of release. What nb-javac provides is detailed elsewhere but in summary it is a fork of the javac finetuned to the Java Editor in NetBeans. It can’t be donated to Apache NetBeans because it is a javac fork and hence GPL licensed, so Oracle does not want to donate it and Apache projects can’t be released with it.
Ultimately, we’d like to drop the need for nb-javac completely. That will simplify things a lot. Plus, that is increasingly possible because from JDK 9 onwards we’re able to use the javac from the JDK that NetBeans runs on for the same purposes as nb-javac. And we’ve (especially Jan Lahoda) been enhancing Apache NetBeans over the past releases to enable the vanilla javac from the JDK on which NetBeans runs to be used increasingly better. And ultimately, of course, this should not be based on the JDK on which NetBeans runs, but on the JDK used by a particular project. Anyway, there have been one or two pull requests around the above, such as this one: https://github.com/apache/netbeans/pull/2108 A question is what about JDK 8. My bold suggestion would be that we explicitly tell our users that they can’t use our Java Editor if they’re running NetBeans on JDK 8. I’m not saying that we should drop support for JDK 8. I’m saying we should show a message that the user should switch to the latest supported JDK for running NetBeans itself on (which of course does not mean that a project can’t use any earlier JDK). Anyway, comments and thoughts welcome. Gj
