Project Leyden: Beginnings

[Christian Wimmer]

Hi Andrew,

Since you mentioned GraalVM: note that the GraalVM team at Oracle was 
advised to not talk about Native Image on this mailing list. Only when 
concrete questions arise, we will be happy to explain how things are 
handled in Native Image.

-Christian


On 5/27/22 06:33, Andrew Haley wrote:
> 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.
>