New candidate JEP: 362: Deprecate the Solaris and SPARC Ports

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

Hello!

On 10/30/19 11:39 PM, Mikael Vidstedt wrote:
> Thanks for your interest in the SPARC and Solaris ports.  If you really want to sign up to maintain these, I’d like first to help you understand the work that’d be involved.
> 
> Several major projects and features are slated to make their way into the mainline JDK in the near future.  Many of them require significant changes in the JVM and in platform/architecture specific code, and you’d be responsible for them.  A few of the most significant ones:
> (...)
> The above isn’t meant to be an exhaustive list, but will hopefully give you a rough idea of what you’d need to do in order to maintain these ports.  A lot of the work is either required for specification compliance, or is central to the performance model of Java. Also, keep in mind that a lot of the functionality would need to be implemented in three different JIT compilers: C1, C2, and Graal.
> 
> In addition to the feature work and code changes it’s worth stressing that continuous testing of the ports is needed to ensure high quality. The machine resources and human time required to analyze and address failures are significant, and shouldn’t be underestimated.
> 
> So, given this information, are you still interested?

I have to admit that this rather overwhelming and I'm not sure whether I'm able
to keep up with the workload as an independent open source developer.

I feel like that OpenJDK is starting to develop into a direction of low portability
again. When I started working on OpenJDK, I had hoped to be able to help make OpenJDK
and Java more portable. But I feel there is no real interest in the OpenJDK community
to make Java available on a wide variety of platforms besides x86, ARM, POWER and
S390x.

I understand that there are commercial interests and that maintaining portable code
requires time and effort. But I also see that other compiler projects like Rust
and GCC achieve high portability without requiring a very high maintenance effort.

For what is worth, I'm not so much interested in the Solaris port as I don't have
much expertise in development on the platform and it seems that Solaris is mostly
in maintenance mode these days. Although I'm surprised to see that Solaris support
in OpenJDK is being canned already when support for Solaris itself is not supposed
to end before 2034 [1].

I wish Shark wouldn't have fallen into oblivion [2] as using LLVM is a really good
idea in order to achieve both portability and reasonable performance which is why
LLVM is popular with other languages like Rust, Swift, Julia and many more [3].

I think portability is important for a language to be widely adopted. It's one of
the reasons why C is so highly successful. It's just available everywhere.

Would it be possible to just keep the SPARC port for Linux?

Adrian

> [1] https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris/another-update-on-oracle-java-and-oracle-solaris
> [2] http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/8189173
> [3] https://llvm.org/ProjectsWithLLVM/

-- 
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer - glaubitz at debian.org
`. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz at physik.fu-berlin.de
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