Explicitly mark JEP 154 / JDK-8046144 as April Fools joke
some-java-user-99206970363698485155 at vodafonemail.de
some-java-user-99206970363698485155 at vodafonemail.de
Wed Jun 25 16:54:00 UTC 2025
Hello,
it seems JEP 154 / JDK-8046144 "Remove Serialization" is an April Fools
joke:
* It was created on 2012/04/01 20:00
* It says "severely-degraded environments, e.g., Microsoft Windows
machines running the McAfee Antivirus program"
I doubt that in any official document the JDK maintainers would dare
writing this, and even in this April Fools JEP it seems risky.
* It says "available values for serialVersionUID are running out"
To my knowledge the serialVersionUID value is per class, so this
seems to be made up (at least to some extent).
* As solution it suggests "build two copies of rt.jar"
* Under "Impact" it says "Twitter: High"
The main problem is that it is not immediately obvious that this is an
April Fools joke, because it appears as regular JEP within the list of
other legit JEPs and there is no explicit mention of it being an April
Fools joke. The JEP also sounds plausible to some extent because there
are multiple real flaws with Java Serialization.
This has lead to this JEP being referenced (unironically) in real
discussions and also recently in a scientific paper,
https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.20485.
It could also harm future discussions about removing or refactoring Java
Serialization in case it is used as argument that this had already been
rejected in the past.
Therefore to avoid any further harm / confusion by this JEP, please:
* Change JEP 154 to clearly indicate that it is an April Fools joke;
ideally by prepending its title with something like "April Fools"
* Change JDK-8046144 in a similar way
* /Do not delete/ either of them; it might only cause more confusion [1]
Kind regards
[1] See also JEP 187 and
https://marxsoftware.blogspot.com/2021/09/missing-jeps-145-187.html
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