Using an IDE to work on the Java library

[Andrew Haley]

On 22/11/17 17:54, Martin Buchholz wrote:
> I remember back in the '80s the tool vendors were making fun of us folk who
> used "grep" as their code understanding tool.  Now 30 years later, I still
> live in Emacs with recursive grep being my main way of navigating the
> sources.  It's tough because openjdk's java sources may be ahead of IDE
> language support, and the sources also come with lots of hard-to-grok C++
> and Makefiles.

The saddest thing about all this is that using the IDE to edit the
system itself just worked 30-odd years ago on Smalltalk systems.  All
you had to do was open a class in the browser, edit a method and save
it.  All of the debugging just worked.  We have regressed
tremendously.

I wonder if it ought to be a basic release criterion for OpenJDK that
some basic tooling for working on the system itself should just work.
If we want to attract people to work on this project we don't need
barriers which make their life impossible.

-- 
Andrew Haley
Java Platform Lead Engineer
Red Hat UK Ltd. <https://www.redhat.com>
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