Using an IDE to work on the Java library

[Robbin Ehn]

On 2017-06-05 18:51, Andrew Dinn wrote:
> On 05/06/17 17:30, Andrew Haley wrote:
>> Sorry for what must seem like a newbie question...
>>
>> I've done almost all of my work on HotSpot, and have very little
>> experience trying to use an IDE to work on the Java library.  Eclipse
>> is fine when working on libraries outdie the JDK itself, but seems to
>> want to look inside src.zip for its sources when debugging.  It would
>> be really nice to be able to see (and edit) the real Java source files
>> in jdk/java.base/.
>>
>> I suppose there must be some way to create a Project for an IDE, so
>> that debugging the standard library is easy.  Is there some advice
>> around somewhere?  What do people do?
>
> I use IntelliJ Idea. The latest releases cope quite happily with jdk9/10.

If you are a vim guy, I can recommend IntelliJ with the vim plugin.

/Robbin

>
> In the project settings you can set up a JDK you build from scratch as a
> project JDK and the sources located in the build image (in src.zip) will
> be picked up automatically by Idea.
>
> In order to see sources not in src.zip you need to add the jdk source
> tree to the project's main module as a source root (do this from the
> "open module settings" or "project structure" dialogs). Likewise, if you
> want the jdk.vm.ci sources for graal from the hotspot tree. So, for the
> latter case, I add jdk9/jdk/hotspot/src/jdk.internal.vm.ci as a source
> root. (Alternatively you can add it to an extra module that then gets
> inherited by the project module(s)).
>
> You then have to tag the relevant module subdirs in these added trees as
> src directories to bring the desired source files into play. For example
> for the jdk.vm.ci sources root I tag share/classes/jdk.v.ci.code/src etc
> as source dirs. Once again this is done from the "open module settings"
> dialog.
>
> Note that you can configure the module settings for app modules (or for
> any common extra module you add and then make them inherit) so that
> these extra  sources are picked up prior to any sources or (what you
> don't want) class files obtained from the project JDK.
>
> regards,
>
>
> Andrew Dinn
> -----------
> Senior Principal Software Engineer
> Red Hat UK Ltd
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