SA.NEXT - SA feedback needed

[Staffan Larsen]

On 10 feb 2014, at 14:32, Coleen Phillimore <coleen.phillimore at oracle.com> wrote:

> On 2/10/2014 4:07 AM, Staffan Larsen wrote:
>>>> I've said before that I believe the SA should be discontinued unless the problem of duplicated hotspot code in it can be resolved.   We are in the process of changing many things in the code and the tax of a duplicate implementation in Java is too high.  Find a way to use the libjvm.so or a libjvm_sa.so to retrieve hotspot internals.
>>> 
>>> The main problem, as I see it, is the lack of testing and self-verification.  If the SA would do that as part of compilation we wouldn’t have a broken SA every other build.
> 
> No, it's not just that it needs to be tested automatically.   It needs to not make you write your change twice, once in the JVM and another time in Java.   The duplicated code needs to be removed.  There should be exactly one copy of the symbol table code, for example.

That would be ideal, yes. So far I haven’t seen a viable proposal for how to implement this for core file debugging. I’m not saying that it can’t be done, just that we haven’t solved the “how” yet.

/Staffan