JShell: source in langtools vs JDK?

[Maurizio Cimadamore]

Jon, let's reverse the question - why do you think it *should* live in 
langtools? Honestly it feels very different from all other tools that 
live there; there's dependencies on JDI, jline - so to me it feels 
closer to other tools (i.e. jconsole) which already are in the jdk repo. 
I guess my argument is - if langtools defines the core tools to be able 
to work with the JDK, jshell feels like one ore two layer of 
abstractions on top of that.

Maurizio

On 16/09/15 23:31, Jonathan Gibbons wrote:
>
>
> On 09/16/2015 03:06 PM, Robert Field wrote:
>> As part of the JShell code review, Maurizio made the case that JShell 
>> should be in the JDK repo rather than langtools repo (where it is in 
>> the Kulla workspace).  We would like additional feedback on this 
>> before proceeding --
>>
>>> On Sep 11, 2015, at 8:25 AM, Maurizio Cimadamore 
>>> <maurizio.cimadamore at oracle.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> One general high-level comment, which I also pointed out elsewhere, 
>>> is that I'm not sure jshell really belongs in langtools; while it's 
>>> semantically (obviously) related to langtools - it is a rather 
>>> different beasts w.r.t. all other tools in langtools-land; the fact 
>>> that it depends on the JDK (for jline, and for JDI in general) makes 
>>> it very hard to run on top of a random JDK and then bootstrapping 
>>> classes - which is a technique widely used to be able to run 
>>> langtools tools w/o having to do a full build cycle. More 
>>> specifically, talking about IDE integration, I don't see how 
>>> IntelliJ/Netbeans langtools projects (and the langtools internal 
>>> developer ant build) could be updated to be able to run/debug jshell 
>>> w/o a full build.
>>
>>
>
> In the Big Picture view of the universe, folk would like to 
> restructure the repos in an OPenJDK forest, at which point the 
> distinction between the langtools and jdk repos will likely disappear, 
> or at least become very (very) blurred.  While that change is not 
> imminent, IMO opinion, it significantly reduces the impact of the 
> reasons why JShell should not be in langtools.
>
> I also don't entirely agree with the IDE reasons either.  If you want 
> to work on JShell in an IDE, you're going to have to do what it takes 
> to get rid of the red squiggly lines anyway, whatever repo the code is 
> in. To keep JShell out of Langtools because it doesn't fit our current 
> methodologies is a case of the tail wagging the dog.
>
> Also, I note that JDK 9 now builds the product module by module. In 
> times past, we built the world repo by repo, and that would indeed 
> have been good reason to keep JShell out of langtools, because of the 
> dependencies of JShell on JDK 9 API, like jline. But now, the build 
> will build "interim javac", and can then build JDK modules like 
> java.base and whatever module jline ends up in, and can then build the 
> module containing JShell.
>
> As to how to organize IDE projects, in the worst case, we keep the 
> langtools IDE setup as it is now (no JShell) and have a separate 
> project for JShell itself. That is tantamount to what we would do if 
> we push JShell into the jdk repo.
>
> So, I'm saying all that while trying to be agnostic on which repo it 
> should live in.    I don't really agree with the stated reasons why it 
> should not live in langtools, which means that we can look for other 
> reasons to choose one repo or another.
>
> -- Jon