RFC: minimal backport of 8182299 build on OSX 10 + Xcode 8

[Ben Evans]

Hi,

As this appears to have been Warnock'd (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warnock%27s_dilemma), allow me to give it
another kick.

My personal take (for the little that it's worth) is: Given current
adoption rates and trends, JDK 8 is going to be with us for a long time.
Restricting the potential community size of developers working on OpenJDK 8
by:

1.) Requiring that people who develop on Macs jump through virtualisation
hoops and
2.) Making the building of binaries a byzantine process requiring the
maintenance of obsolete Macs

is bad, and we should stop doing it.

Thanks,

Ben

On Fri, Jun 28, 2019 at 4:09 PM Simon Tooke <stooke at redhat.com> wrote:

> Hello everyone,
>
> I would like to make a somewhat controversial proposal: to backport the
> minimal changes required to enable jdk8u to compile and run when built
> with the latest macOS developer tools.
>
> I realize this falls outside of aph's guidelines of "bug fixes only,
> (for now)" and in many ways is only a developer convenience, since I am
> not advocating (at this time) for this build to become the default
> supported for macOS [1].
>
> There changes do not affect the current mac build, which requires an old
> version of Xcode which doesn't run on modern releases of macOS, but they
> make it much easier for macOS hackers to work with jdk8.
>
> At this point, testing has been confined to bootstrapping the build with
> a jdk8 built using this patch, and to using this build to build a
> working Graal substrateVM.
>
> My version of the backport limits the scope of the 8182299 patches to
> the subset required to get the JDK up and running.  I don't propose
> backporting any changes to remove Clang warnings, etc.  Because of that,
> my changes are confined in scope.
>
> Potential long term benefits (if this build does seem healthy enough for
> production) are simplified macOS build platforms, a more modern compiler
> and perhaps higher performance.
>
> Bug: https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8182656
>
> Webrev: http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~stooke/webrevs/xcodemacos.webrev/
>
> Thanks for your time,
>
> -Simon
>
> [1] first, potentially removes support for macOS 10.8, second, needs
> more testing.
>
>
>