The future of OpenJDK6

[Martin Buchholz]

On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 5:14 AM, Alex Kasko <alex.kasko.lists at gmail.com>wrote:

>
>>
>> Almost nothing would persuade me to accept 2).  This is an internal
>> method that no application should use.
>>
> Not arguing, just for your information, situation happened to me some
> weeks ago.
> My teammate C++ programmer with little java knowledge was working on
> Snappy [1] compatibility with C++ streams. He wanted to build Snappy on his
> Linux box using openjdk6 from packets and was not able to do it - got
> NoSuchMethodError. At the same time it compiles fine with later versions of
> Oracle JDK6. Yes, this Snappy implementation uses undocumented API (for
> optimization purposes) and it has fallback implementation and will run on
> openjdk6. But it cannot be compiled with default java6 in Linux without
> downloading Oracle JDK6 and this caused some frustration.
> Also sun.misc.Unsafe usage is quite popular for specific optimizations,
> I've even seen it once in java job position requirements (as additional
> point).
>

I also think that this change (adding a missing method to Unsafe) is a
perfectly reasonable thing to add to openjdk6.  It is a
performance+stability improvement, with a low likelihood of breakage
(unlike updating to javac7, which *intentionally* will break some builds).
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/jdk6-dev/attachments/20130314/f346ff5c/attachment.html