Java 7 for Mac OSX

[Johannes Schindelin]

Hi Mike,

On Mon, 20 Feb 2012, Mike Swingler wrote:

> On Feb 20, 2012, at 3:29 AM, Henri Gomez wrote:
> 
> >> One question:
> >> 
> >> By adding 32-bit support, do you mean the binary will be runnable on
> >> a 32-bit machine? Or, the sources can be built on a 32-bit machine?
> > 
> > To me 32 bit support means you could use -d32 flag to have JVM works
> > in a 32bit land, so safe memory in many cases.
> 
> Supporting a second architecture effectively doubles the testing
> overhead, and basically doubles the budget you need to spend on QA. What
> is the benefit to Oracle Corp for supporting a legacy architecture?
> 
> This is a serious question,

Thanks for keeping the discussion civilized :-)

In my line of work, it is extremely important that Java -- especially on
MacOSX -- continues to work in 32-bit mode. The reason is that we
frequently need to connect to microscope vendors' native libraries to
control their hardware, and for some reason most of these vendors are
unwilling or unable to provide 64-bit libraries.

To a lesser extent, the increased memory-requirements of 64-bit Java would
hurt, too; I suspect a few of the Java components we use to allocate, and
forget about, metric tons of objects per second.

Without having Java/32-bit working on MacOSX, my colleagues all over the
planet and me would be stuck in a very uncomfortable situation of having
to use outdated and unmaintained Java.

Thank you for your understanding,
Johannes