The future of OpenJDK6

[Andrew Hughes]

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

That was my thought on this patch when it was originally posted for
review.

As to javac7... I was just testing the waters and I take the hint ;)
-- 
Andrew :)

Free Java Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc. (http://www.redhat.com)

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