Java 8 compatibility

[Stefan Marr]

Hi:

> On 05 Apr 2015, at 01:03, Thomas Wuerthinger <thomas.wuerthinger at oracle.com> wrote:
> 
> Yes, this could be a good way to get people started without any installation issues. Stefan, you already created such an image for the artefact evaluation? Maybe one could prepare one that includes also some Java test programs, a pre-built IGV, and some example IGV graphs.

Yes, preparing such an image isn’t really an issue. Links to the image for the PLDI paper are here [1].
It would probably be ‘nice-to-have’ also for tutorial/hands-on sessions. 
However, I guess that’s mostly a one-shot thing, because who would maintain the image and keep it up to date?

For improving the ‘first impression’ effect, in my experience, reducing the complexity of build-dependencies is the only longterm option. For instance, the PLDI instructions for setting up the experiments on a new system are already outdated. And the paper hasn’t even been presented yet :(
Since the latest JDK8u40 can’t be use to build Graal, just following my current instructions will fail with an obscure JNI-related build error.

Not that there is anything one could now do about it, except changing the setup instructions, but well, this is less than ideal…

Best regards
Stefan

[1] http://stefan-marr.de/papers/pldi-marr-et-al-zero-overhead-metaprogramming-artifacts/

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