Draft JEP: To use UTF-8 as the default charset for the Java virtual machine.

[Xueming Shen]

Hi Volker,

Yes, the handing of sun.jnu.encoding will not be changed. It will remain as
a read-only/informative system property.

sun.jnu.encoding is really an implementation details (as well as 
file.encoding,
though in this JEP file.encoding might be used to provide a mechanism to 
fallback
to the current/old/existing behavior, so might become a public/official 
interface/
system property). From API perspective the Charset.defaultCharset() is 
the only
place to obtain the "Java virtual machine's default charset".

As Alan said in previous comment, clarifications will be included in the 
final
version based on feedback/suggestion

-Sherman

On 2/21/18, 8:11 AM, Volker Simonis wrote:
> Hi Sherman,
>
> the tricky part is really "sun.jnu.encoding" and how the VM interacts
> with the underlying OS. You may remember that we had an interesting
> discussion about this topic some time ago [1].
>
> As far as I understand, the JEP doesn't plan to change the handling of
> "sun.jnu.encoding". So does this mean that the VM will still correctly
> start and work on system with a platform encoding different from
> UTF-8? I.e. will starting the VM from a path which contains characters
> in that special platform encoding or classpath/argument settings with
> characters in that special character encoding still work? If the
> answer will be yes (which I expect) maybe you could explain that a
> little more detailed in the JEP. I.e. the JEP should say that it
> changes the default encoding for the Java API classes and not the
> default encoding for natively accessing system resources.
>
> Maybe the JEP should also mention that "sun.jnu.encoding" is more or
> less a "read-only" property which can not be reliable set by the user
> on the command line (it's a chicken-egg problem: for the parsing of
> the command line we need the correct encoding, so it can not be
> reliably set on the command line).
>
> For these reasons the Summary "Use UTF-8 as the Java virtual machine's
> default charset ..." is a little misleading. Maybe you could rephrase
> to something like "Use UTF-8 as the default charset so that Java APIs
> that depend on the default charset behave consistently across all
> platforms."
>
> Thank you and best regards,
> Volker
>
> [1] http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/core-libs-dev/2015-December/thread.html#37516
>
> On Wed, Feb 21, 2018 at 7:31 AM, Xueming Shen<xueming.shen at oracle.com>  wrote:
>> This draft JEP contains a proposal to use UTF-8 as the default charset for
>> the JVM, so that
>> APIs that depend on the default charset behave consistently cross all
>> platforms.
>>
>> For more details, please see:
>> https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8187041
>>
>> Sherman