KSL: moving forward

[Jonathan Gibbons]

Compiler folk,

When KSL was set up a year ago, it was in  the early days of OpenJDK. 
Things have changed a lot in the past year, most notably with the 
availability to the OpenJDK community of direct access to the latest 
OpenJDK sources, via the Mercurial repositories at hg.openjdk.net. As a 
result, it no longer seems necessary to host a centralized repository 
for KSL, in a different source code management system, that is almost by 
definition going to be less up to date than the Mercurial repositories, 
and which has additional constraints, such as having to sign the SCA  in 
order to contribute code to the repository.

Therefore, it is proposed to close the KSL project currently available 
at ksl.dev.java.net. However, this does not mean that KSL is going away.

Already, people can download the latest compiler code, hack on it and 
publish experimental versions on personal blogs, or as part of Stephen 
Colebourne's Kijaro project, or any other place of their choosing.  This 
allows anyone so interested the maximum flexibility in publishing their 
work and soliciting feedback from the community. To facilitate a central 
place for announcements of any such work, it is proposed that we will 
open up the compiler-dev alias to allow announcements for KSL-related 
work. Such announcements should include a pointer to a place where the 
work can be found, and should provide a location for any follow-up 
discussion, such as a blog, forum, or separate email list.

Some experiments may be so successful that they merit consideration for 
inclusion in OpenJDK itself. Generally speaking, language changes are a 
Big Deal[1],  and so for such work, the way forward would be to propose 
and create an OpenJDK Project[2], such as has been done for the Modules 
project [3], which includes the language and VM changes for JSR 294. 
Smaller changes may not merit a separate project, but still need to 
follow the appropriate procedures to become part of JLS, javac, and OpenJDK.

And, to dreadfully mix metaphors, big oaks from little acorns grow, and 
KSL is (still) a great way to grow little acorns.

-- Jon

[1] http://blogs.sun.com/darcy/entry/so_you_want_to_change
[2] http://openjdk.java.net/projects/
[3] http://openjdk.java.net/projects/modules/