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

[Andrew John Hughes]

On 03/07/2019 19:30, Ben Evans wrote:
> 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.
>>
>>
>>

I saw it, but there's a CPU on right now. I'll have a look properly once
that's out of the way.

My initial thought is what is the subset you refer to? The problem with
backporting bits of a change is that it then looks like that change is
backported, but some parts of it are actually missing.
-- 
Andrew :)

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

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