Project Leyden: Beginnings

[Andrew Haley]

On 5/20/22 15:42, mark.reinhold at oracle.com wrote:

 > Let us begin!

As you'd expect, here at Red Hat there's a variety of opinions.
Rather than simply post my own response to this, I've been talking to
Middleware architects (the likely _users_ of Leyden!) as well as our
OpenJDK team members. Here's what we think:

   We're excited to see Leyden taking shape and will be active
   participants. Our customers are benefiting from GraalVM today and as
   such we’ll continue to engage with that project as the Leyden ideas
   are explored and take shape.

   Bringing standardization to this space is important for developers
   as it will clarify the behaviours they can depend on.  As we engage
   in updating the standard, we should consider not just new behavior,
   but also exceptions and variations that can accommodate some of the
   existing behavior of GraalVM such as build-time initialization.

   The proposed incremental approach will ensure we bring along the
   current ecosystem and devtools while carefully introducing any new
   constraints. We also see the benefit in segmenting the problem space
   into discrete areas that can be introduced sooner rather than
   waiting for a big-bang integration of multiple constraints.

   > In the long run we will likely embrace the full closed-world
   > constraint in order to produce fully-static images.

   Our experience with Java on K8s and containers (notably Quarkus) has
   demonstrated real world benefits of a closed-world approach, so it's
   good to see it explicitly listed as a likely goal in the long
   run. It will be important that Leyden is careful to specify its
   efforts in the fast start / small footprint space while being
   mindful of that constraint.  Hopefully, we can all work towards a
   future that converges both GraalVM's efforts and those of Leyden.

-- 
Andrew Haley  (he/him)
Java Platform Lead Engineer
Red Hat UK Ltd. <https://www.redhat.com>
https://keybase.io/andrewhaley
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