Updating Visual Studio for 8u builds after EOL of VS2010 in July

[Currie, Dave]

Hi.

As you may know, Visual Studio 2010, the current toolchain for building OpenJDK 8 on Windows, will go EOL on July 14th, 2020 [1]. Most Windows builds of OpenJDK 8 package msvcr100.dll, the C++ runtime DLL. At Amazon, we have heard feedback that shipping this DLL is going to start raising issues with compliance processes that require all libraries to be up-to-date and supported.

We have been testing Amazon Corretto built with Visual Studio 2013, an updated toolchain. The changes to the build are simple but it does not work out-of-the-box and there are caveats/jtreg failures that need to be resolved. The biggest problem we have seen so far is that users who are running native libraries via JNI may be inadvertently using the msvcr100.dll that is loaded by the JVM and, when this is replaced, their app will fail. There are simple workarounds (e.g. install [2]) but it will not be drop-in compatible for this case.

Is anyone else seeing similar feedback? Is anyone else considering a move to VS13 (or later) for OpenJDK 8 updates and have you seen blockers in this process?

Dave Currie

[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/search?alpha=Visual%20Studio%202010%20(all%20editions)
[2] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=21576