Java 8 compatibility

[Stefan Marr]

Dear all:

I would like to add one more thing to this topic.

The current state of Java versions Graal and Truffle run on is, well, ‘complex’.

I submitted TruffleSOM and related artifacts to the PLDI artifact evaluation committee, and while those volunteers evaluating the artifacts probably could not spend unlimited time on doing their work, I would have hoped they succeed in building everything from scratch.

But, with the complexity of the required Java versions, they failed.
I guess, my instructions where not precise enough.

So, what I would like to ask, is to consider the possibility to reduce the requirements exposed to _users_ to a bare minimum.
While I understand the concerns for distribution and the desire to ship jars for Java 1.7, I do not understand why this should be any concern for someone downloading Truffle and Graal for rerunning experiments, or even starting to use those systems.

I also understand that it is hard to support all versions of Java.
So, I would like to suggest that everything is working with exactly _one_ specific version of Java.

Your users will thank you, I am sure.

Best regards
Stefan


> On 26 Nov 2014, at 17:38, Gilles Duboscq <duboscq at ssw.jku.at> wrote:
> 
> Hello Stefan,
> 
> the reason we do that is to ensure that Truffle is built against Java
> 7. This is required to make sure that the Truffle projects do not use
> any Java 8 API by mistake. So we really want ==1.7  and not >=1.7.
> Project *using* Truffle are >=1.7.
> 
> -Gilles
> 
> On Wed, Nov 26, 2014 at 5:01 PM, Stefan Marr <java at stefan-marr.de> wrote:
>> Hi Christian:
>> 
>> 
>>> On 26 Nov 2014, at 16:54, Christian Humer <christian.humer at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Short answer yes. The Truffle API is still compatible to Java 7. And it has to remain compatible for some time to come because of JRuby.
>> 
>> Well, my understanding is that’s rather a ‘no, it also works with Java 8’.
>> I am not asking to change the minimum version that is supported, but currently, I have to change suite.py manually if I want to compile Graal without having to install Java 7 as well.
>> 
>> Is there a way to ask mx to just interpret the check as >=1.7 instead ==1.7?
>> 
>> Thanks
>> Stefan
>> 
>> --
>> Stefan Marr
>> INRIA Lille - Nord Europe
>> http://stefan-marr.de/research/
>> 
>> 
>> 

-- 
Stefan Marr
INRIA Lille - Nord Europe
http://stefan-marr.de/research/