RFR (11u, XXL): Upstream/backport Shenandoah to JDK11u

[Andrew Haley]

On 29/06/2020 17:55, Attila Szegedi wrote:
> I agree with everything Gil said and want to provide some additional perspective as a current operator of business-critical infrastructure relying on Java.
>
> TL;DR:
>
> I’m currently operating a largeish cluster of machines running Java
> 11. I definitely wouldn't appreciate 11 acquiring new major
> features, flag-activated or not. I find it natural that if we want
> new features, we need to migrate to a new feature release of Java.

OK.

See my reply to Gil; please feel free to reply to it too, if you like.

> As a closing opinionated thought, I think the OpenJDK developer
> community developed (hah) a quite severe feature-backporting habit
> mostly out of difficulties of making the Java 8-to-9 barrier with
> its introduction of modules, so Java 8 became a prime backporting
> target. It seems that habit, once established, now extends to 11 as
> well. I also believe this habit is misguided; there’s simply no
> similar technical hurdle upgrading from 11 to, say, 14 as there was
> from 8 to 9. (Well, I will allow that it is possible I am not aware
> of some issue that makes it hard.)

Sure, and I don't disagree, but my job isn't to try to persuade users
to adopt new Java versions, it's to provide them with the best free
JDK 11. Shenandoah solves a real-world problem that people encounter
in production.

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