JDK8 no longer required to develop Graal

[Zhongwei Yao]

Hi, Doug,

Thanks for doing this! I verified it on AArch64 and it works without JDK8 now. It makes the development process for AArch64 platform much easier!

And I notice there are 2 categories of the test in Travis CI for Graal. One uses JDK8 and another uses JDK11. Since JDK8 is no longer required to develop Graal, but I see the FindBugs task in CI test (e.g. https://travis-ci.org/oracle/graal/jobs/416506388) depends on JDK8. Is this the only reason to keep JDK8 in the CI test? Or is there any other reasons?

--
Best regards,
Zhongwei

________________________________________
From: graal-dev <graal-dev-bounces at openjdk.java.net> on behalf of Doug Simon <doug.simon at oracle.com>
Sent: Monday, August 13, 2018 8:23 PM
To: graal developers; hotspot compiler
Subject: JDK8 no longer required to develop Graal

Developing Graal has always required a JDK8 to be present in either JAVA_HOME or EXTRA_JAVA_HOMES. Please see http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/graal-dev/2018-June/005413.html for background on this.

I've recently pushed changes to mx[1] and Graal[2] that removes this requirement. That is, you should now be able to develop Graal with only a JDK11 in JAVA_HOME. I have updated https://github.com/oracle/graal/blob/master/compiler/README.md#building-graal to reflect this.

If you run into any problems developing Graal with only a JDK 11, please open an issue at https://github.com/oracle/graal/issues or send a message to graal-dev at openjdk.java.net.

-Doug

[1] https://github.com/graalvm/mx/commit/c9f873aa979b2a724e7e213fd1e0d4ce7131b87f
[2] https://github.com/oracle/graal/commit/a4070ec3d1b16d49f42694b3f0a46a39010b445c