Proposed source code and regression test suite improvement projects for JDK 9

[Mike Duigou]

On Dec 13 2013, at 11:13 , Joe Darcy <joe.darcy at oracle.com> wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> With JDK 9 about to get underway, I'd like to propose several source code and regression test suite improvement efforts to tackle during this release.
> 
> Over the years, the JDK code base has accumulated a bit of technical debt in various areas. In JDK 8, efforts have already been underway to pay down that technical debt including:

> For JDK 9, I propose we complete these initiatives for the code in the langtools and jdk repositories (then possibly extend to jaxp, jaxws, etc.):

> Reducing C/C++ build warnings would be a worthwhile goal too, but is complicated by the number of C/C++ compilers used across different supported platforms.

On this topic I believe that one aspect we can tackle is to reduce the number of different sets of compiler settings across modules (see compilation of SCTP native library for an example) used and standardize on a set of compiler options and warnings. There's also the possibility to enable additional warnings on certain platforms that may provide benefit across all platforms once fixed. eg. GCC -Wformat -Wformat-security etc. The blocking issue here would be that using these options potentially imposes a requirement of newer compiler versions on some platforms.

Mike