What should the relationship between ports and developers of large projects be?

[Andrew Haley]

In the discussion about Porting JEP 425 (virtual threads preview), I
see that some ports only just started, and we're less than a couple of
weeks out from RDP 1. I understand why no one likes to start early:
it's not at all easy to port a feature before it's in its final form.
But given that some of the responses were of the form "fix crashes
after..." I assume that some porters were taken by surprise.

[ I may have misunderstood the situation, in which case I apologize,
and please ignore this email. ]

Full disclosure: I was aware that Loom was targeting virtual threads
for JDK 19, but I'd failed to notice the significance of Virtual
Threads being a Preview, not an Incubator: all ports *must* implement
a Preview.

So, it's going to be something of a rush. I hope that JDK 19 won't be
blighted by broken or absent ports because of this. This would be a
great shame.

It's been pointed out to me that The Virtual Threads patch was in
review for a month, and that porters were notified in September last
year that Virtual Threads were coming, so ports should start looking at
their patches. I don't know if any ports did.

Perhaps there has not been enough communication between owners of ports
and developers of big-ticket new items such as Loom. Perhaps, also,
given the shock of Virtual Threads dropping when it did, people will
be more aware when the next big-ticket item (JEP 424?)  drops.

One thing which has been suggested to me is the that new features
should be introduced earlier in the release cycle. I'm not sure how
practical that is.

Also, it can be quite difficult to reach port owners: once a port has
going into mainline, it might not be clear even who they are.

I would be nice if out of this came an invigorated two-way flow of
information between new projects and port maintainers, so that
everyone understands where they are. I don't know how to make that
happen, but perhaps we can come up with something.

-- 
Andrew Haley  (he/him)
Java Platform Lead Engineer
Red Hat UK Ltd. <https://www.redhat.com>
https://keybase.io/andrewhaley
EAC8 43EB D3EF DB98 CC77 2FAD A5CD 6035 332F A671

-- 
Andrew Haley  (he/him)
Java Platform Lead Engineer
Red Hat UK Ltd. <https://www.redhat.com>
https://keybase.io/andrewhaley
EAC8 43EB D3EF DB98 CC77 2FAD A5CD 6035 332F A671