On Wed, May 17, 2017 at 1:08 AM, Andrew Dinn <ad...@redhat.com> wrote:
> On 16/05/17 19:11, Gregg Wonderly wrote: > > <ad cohortem hominum snipped (pardon my French)> > > > If we really cannot actually keep from breaking 90% of existing Java > > in the market place when this new JDK release goes out, how valuable > > is JigSaw really? > > citation needed? > I mostly ignore jigsaw, and check in every now and then. I have a few co-workers that have poked at migrating their products to Java 9. So far as I know, nobody has succeeded yet. With significant regularity, I see issues pop up on this list that have odd problems, or persist in being unresolved. One of my favorites at the moment is automatic module names - a problem that Jigsaw caused for itself. Maybe that one is resolved for now, but I'm pretty certain that questions will come flooding back once Java 9 GAs. As near as I can tell, applications that compile and run under Java 8 will mostly *not* "just work" with Java 9 JRE. And that seems to be the lived experience of my co-workers. If a project is lucky, the only changes necessary will involve command line parameters. If a team is unlucky, they will need to rebuild for Java 9. If a team is really unlucky, they will need to partially or fully modularize. At which point some even more juggling is required to continue to support Java 7 & 8, if that's required by customers. My overall concerns for Jigsaw: https://medium.com/@one.eric.johnson/java-9-jigsaw-troubles-4fc406ef41e0 I'm not sure what citations you expect to see. There's probably nobody out there who can afford to pre-flight an EA build of Java 9 against all their products to see what the actual costs are going to be. Based on anecdotal evidence from this mailing list, significant players in the Java ecosystem - build tools, IDEs, critical libraries - have all had to fix unexpected breakages with Java 9. Obviously, the ones that don't break don't typically show up, so this is a self-selecting example, but an important one. However, even something as simple as requiring changes to command line parameters in order to launch a program compiled for Java 8 is a breaking change. The Jigsaw team seems to be taking this as a mere complaint, rather than as a genuine compatibility issue. Here's a challenge back to the Jigsaw team. Can I still do java -jar ... every existing Java application (without recompile!) that currently launches that way? I'm even willing to cut some slack and ignore applications that use com.sun APIs that have been "private" for years. Will that still work? The Jigsaw community should be able to provide evidence that's still possible, not that we should be required to provide evidence that it isn't. Eric. > regards, > > > Andrew Dinn > ----------- >
