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

[Andrew Haley]

On 11/3/19 10:16 PM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:

> 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.

Right. It's not about whether people are interested in the port but
whether they are prepared to invest in it. From the AArch64 port point
of view, I know just how much investment that is.

> 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.

As someone who is still occasionally a GCC maintainer, I'm not sure if
I believe that. There is a high maintenance effort in keeping GCC
targets going, and if any port becomes unsupported it is dropped.

> 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].

Shark was a good idea (it was -- partly -- my idea) but it couldn't
keep up. It might not be a bad idea to create a "modern" Shark,
perhaps along the lines of Azul's Falcon.

> 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.

It is, and it's available everywhere because someone was prepared to
invest the time and the money in it.

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

If someone wants to support it, sure. But most of the big-ticket jobs
Mikael Vidstedt listed to do aren't related to the host OS.

It is extremely important that we have no dead and rotting code in
OpenJDK.  Of course we love to encourage as many ports as possible,
but they have to build and run and pass the tests, because if they
don't that hurts Free Software.

-- 
Andrew Haley  (he/him)
Java Platform Lead Engineer
Red Hat UK Ltd. <https://www.redhat.com>
https://keybase.io/andrewhaley
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