Seeking help back in the land of Rhino

[Jim Laskey (Oracle)]

There might be some aspects of that, but it is 99% technical.  There are some major changes required to the JVM to support Nashorn properly in JDK 7 (perform well, no memory bloat, security et al.)  And then the question is, why don't we backport those changes to the JVM?  Well, then it becomes a slippery slope of interconnected changes, JDK7 becomes JDK8, why are some people still using 1.4, shouldn't we have a continuous update model, ...

The reality is, that groups who can't migrate from Rhino to Nashorn right away, should take the time to do it right.  Their users are likely not early adopters.  This gives Rhino projects time to mature their migration properly and gives the Nashorn team time to respond to feature requests need to migrate.  The team is always listening and willing to help out.

Speaking of which... Nashorn is locking down for JDK8 and planning for the next releases.  This is where y'all come in.  Nashorn is Open Source.  Let us know what are your priorities.  This also means those willing and able to pitch in, should do so.  If you have any ideas you want to work on and push forward, let us know.  If you want a project to work on, I have a long list, let me know.  Respond to this list or me directly.

Cheers,

-- Jim

On Dec 3, 2013, at 1:50 AM, Tal Liron <tal.liron at threecrickets.com> wrote:

> Same here, I never committed on Rhino, but patched it a lot over the years for special use cases, and know its internals quite well. But I think focusing on Nashorn is the way go.
> 
> I also hope that the Nashorn-backport project will get some official recognition, because many of us can't switch to JVM8 so soon:
> 
> https://bitbucket.org/ramonza/nashorn-backport
> 
> To be honest, I don't really understand why Nashorn can't be JVM7-compatible out of the box. My guess is that's a non-technical decision, just a way to promote upgrades to JVM8. ;)
> 
> On 12/03/2013 05:47 AM, Hannes Wallnoefer wrote:
>> As the one who did most of the maintenance work on Rhino over the past years, I still have a lot of sympathy for Rhino and would love to see it moving on.
>> 
>> For my part I have found I don't have the time or mental bandwidth to lead that work (as I used to) or even contribute substantially. I also think Nashorn has far greater promise than Rhino, and in many regards is far ahead already (ECMA compliance, indy everywhere instead of slow property lookup or reflection, compiling large scripts ...).
>> 
>> I do have some suggestions for moving on with Rhino, however. Since they're off-topic here I'll post them on the Rhino list.
>> 
>> Hannes
>> 
>> Am 2013-12-02 18:50, schrieb Greg Brail:
>>> Nashorn committers -- it looks like you are all hard at work and producing
>>> something very promising.
>>> 
>>> In the meantime, my group is doing a lot of work with Rhino, and from the
>>> traffic on the mailing list there are quite a few others around the world
>>> using it as well. Rhino needs some maintenance, and I'd like to figure out
>>> a way to get that done. There are bugs to be fixed and other features to be
>>> improved, and it'd be better to do it as the "Rhino community" rather than
>>> as a disconnected set of forks.
>>> 
>>> However, all the Rhino committers seem to have gone over to Nashorn.
>>> 
>>> Were any of you on this list formerly Rhino committers? Would you be able
>>> to give me some help figuring out how to get a new set of committers
>>> appointed so that we can continue to move forward with Rhino while you guys
>>> work on Nashorn?
>>> 
>>> Thanks, and feel free to contact me privately if this mailing list isn't
>>> appropriate.
>>> 
>> 
>