Java 8 compatibility

[Stefan Marr]

Hi Thomas:

> On 04 Apr 2015, at 15:15, Thomas Wuerthinger <thomas.wuerthinger at oracle.com> wrote:
> 
> The mx tool and its related requirements (i.e., a Java 7 and a Java 8 version installed) are only relevant for Graal developers. Graal users and Truffle language developers do not have any exposure to this implementation detail and can use binaries provided either by third parties [1] or via the Oracle technology network [2].

Perhaps, that’s a cultural clash here.
I understand Graal and Truffle as open source projects.
And, as such, the source is the relevant artifact. Making it easy to build for users seems to me something very worthwhile. 

So far, I only heard arguments I cannot really follow, because I don’t see why the requirements for a release build should make building on a user machine harder.

But specifically, for my situation, I can’t just point to prebuilt binaries for all platforms. While I didn’t have to patch Graal for the last paper, at some point in the paper writing process, I selected a specific version of Graal. One that worked well, because bugs were fixed. But, it is one between releases, so there is no binary. And, later changes to Truffle would require re-testing, and perhaps changes to my experiments. So, using a later release might or might not work. 


> We are happy to assist academic artefact evaluation committee members in case they run into issues when building Graal from its sources.

Unfortunately, that’s not how it works. If they can’t build it, they’ll fall back to the provided binaries (in this case they got a VirtualBox image with everything prebuilt).

But, the problem here is actually one you should be worried about: it is a bad first impression. If the reviewers where thinking of further looking into Graal/Truffle, they might get discouraged by not being able to build it easily.

So, let me restate the question: Would you accept patches that makes it possible to build Graal/Truffle with a single specific version of JDK8 that works?

Best regards
Stefan


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