New candidate JEP: 335: Deprecate the Nashorn JavaScript Engine

[mark.reinhold at oracle.com]

I’d like to clarify two points about this JEP [1].

First, this is not a proposal to remove Nashorn in any particular JDK
release -- it’s just a proposal to deprecate Nashorn, most likely in JDK
11, to enable its potential removal in some later release, yet to be
determined.  No one needs to worry that applications that use Nashorn
won’t run on JDK 11.

Second, the principal purpose of this JEP was to prompt a wide discussion
about the future of Nashorn -- as indeed it has.  (Could this have been
done more gracefully?  Sure.  We’ll remember that for next time.)

Most of the developers who originally built Nashorn are now working on
even newer features, so naturally they’re trying to reduce the amount of
time that they spend maintaining Nashorn.

The question behind JEP 335 is, simply, this: Does anyone wish to take
on the maintenance of Nashorn after JDK 11?  (We asked much the same
question about the CMS garbage collector, almost a year ago [2]).

If a set of credible developers expresses a clear desire to maintain
Nashorn after JDK 11 then all of us who work on this code base will find
a way to make that happen.  Maybe Nashorn stays in the JDK, or maybe it’s
removed from the JDK and maintained in some other OpenJDK Project and
published to Maven Central, or maybe some completely different approach
is taken.  Exactly what happens depends, mostly, on who shows up.

So ... any takers?

- Mark


[1] http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/335
[2] http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/hotspot-gc-dev/2016-July/018545.html