Project Leyden: Beginnings

[Andrew Dinn]

Hi Volker,

On 31/05/2022 15:28, Volker Simonis wrote:
> On Sat, May 28, 2022 at 6:47 PM Christian Wimmer
>> 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.
>>
> 
> Sorry, but this seems really weird to me. With OpenJDK and GraalVM
> Oracle is running two major open source projects and now Oracle
> forbids its own employees working on one of the project to communicate
> with the other ones? Is Oracle afraid of its own Terms of Use [1] or
> am I missing something obvious? From my understanding, Oracle
> employees working on the OpenJDK have started project Leyden to
> introduce "a concept of _static images_ to the Java Platform" [2] and
> "take inspiration from past efforts to explore this" like "the Native
> Image feature of GraalVM" [2]. And then it took some other Oracle
> employees another two years just to find out that they don't want its
> first open source project to get too much inspired by the second one?
> 
> I'm puzzled...
> 
> [1] https://openjdk.java.net/legal/tou/terms
> [2] https://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/discuss/2020-April/005429.html
I am not sure how you arrived at the conclusion that "Oracle forbids its 
own employees working on one of the project to communicate with the 
other ones". That's particularly weird since I know that the two teams 
have been working together for a long time -- for example to ensure 
GraalVM is ready to implement Loom.

I took Christian's first statement merely to indicate that this would 
not be the correct forum for general discussion of GraalVM Native. 
That's not surprising. This project is primarily about arriving at a 
satisfactory model for static Java. That may ultimately lead to some 
revisions in how GraalVM Native operates and -- we hope - some revisions 
to the language or runtime that might simplify the life of GraalVM 
developers. It may also need to consider some of the things that were 
done or are being done in the GraalVM Native project. However, mostly 
what is discussed here will have no direct bearing on how the GraalVM 
Native implementation proceeds. The GraalVM project has its own forums 
for those discussions and that is where they should proceed.

If you think that first statement means anything more than that then I 
recommend you what he said in follow up to that. Christian explicitly 
stated that the GraalVM team will be "happy to talk about how things are 
handled in Native Image ... when concrete questions arise". That looks 
to me to be a fairly unambiguous and generous offer to provide advice, 
based on the experience garnered by the GraalVM team, where it applies 
to problems Leyden needs to address.

I must say I find the rest of your post to be equally as marred by 
speculation and misreading of the prior and current situation. However, 
that's not my main takeaway; most of all I find what what you said to be 
irrelevant. I would much prefer to drop all speculation about what might 
or might not be going on inside Oracle and instead get on with looking 
into how we can move this project forward. Oracle staff from both the 
OpenJDK and GraalVM projects have stated that they are willing to 
provide input to this project. Can we not simply thank them for that and 
work with them?

regards,


Andrew Dinn
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