Hi, The Object Teams project[1] has been successfully using BCEL for around 13 years now. As Java 8 becomes widely used, we obviously can no longer use BCEL 5.2. For a while it seemed as if BCEL was dead, but I was happy to see more activity as of late. This now puts as on a crossroad between two options: (1) migrate to BCEL 6.0 (2) rewrite our 10 kLOC bytecode transformers using another library
I would like to avoid the immense effort involved with (2), but I'm not quite sure if (1) is a viable and sustainable option. First, as an Eclipse project we cannot ship a private version of BCEL. We have to go through the Eclipse IP process in order to put BCEL into "Orbit"[2]. This in general requires a release of the upstream project. (BCEL 5.2 is in Orbit since 2007). Hence, my primary question: can we realistically expect a release of BCEL 6.0 any time soon? Secondly, what happens when future versions of Java introduce new bytecodes? Currently it seems like Java 9 will only introduce one new access flag and a new attribute, but of course future additions can never be ruled out. Is there any commitment in the BCEL team to support future bytecodes? I would be happy to help by way of bug reports, possibly patches, but obviously some committer(s) would need to drive this process. Is this something I could expect? Lastly, already in version 5.2 we had to patch two files, because two mutable static fields in BCEL prohibit the use in a multi threaded application [3]. Note, that I'm not asking to make BCEL thread safe, just to make client-side synchronization possible (without forcing "stop-the-world-we-want-to-call-into-bcel"). As we have a modified version of the two affected classes in use for several years, I wonder if the proposed change could get some support? In all those years we were quite happy with BCEL. Unfortunately, we have to make a hard decision pretty soon. From what I saw on this list, I'm not sure, if staying with BCEL is viable. Can anyone comment? TIA, Stephan -- https://projects.eclipse.org/users/stephan-herrmann [1] http://www.eclipse.org/objectteams [2] http://www.eclipse.org/orbit [3] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/BCEL-267 --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: user-unsubscr...@commons.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: user-h...@commons.apache.org
