Minimum JDK policy for OpenJFX

[Nir Lisker]

>
> there are some advantages in being able to run with the latest JDK LTS
>

One *potential* issue with this approach is that LTS is not defined in
OpenJDK as far as I know. The LTS versions are a business decision of each
distributor. For now, they have all aligned on 8, 11, 17, but nothing
guarantees that this will stay so. What if different vendors LTS different
versions? Suppose that Valhalla and Loom add very attractive features in
JDK 19 (big performance enhancements, leads to big money savings on
hardware, leads to economic incentives to use these, leads to requests to
support these), now vendors can declare JDK 19 as LTS, and what will JavaFX
do?
In OpenJDK all versions are treated equally as it is a spec and not a
business model. Should JavaFX be coupled to business models? Maybe Gluon
has some insights since they give JavaFX LTS support.

A second point, as Michael Strauß mentioned, is that maybe we should see
what features are going to be delivered in the next versions and judge if
there's something attractive enough for library developers to base our
decision on. Sealed classes from Amber are certainly one of them. Panama
might provide handy features for JavaFX's interfacing with native code,
like Foreign Memory Access, though I didn't look into it in detail.
Valhalla is certainly too far away to consider, and Loom is rather
irrelevant for JavaFX and GUIs in general.
If anyone has insights into relevant upcoming features I'll be happy to
learn.

- Nir

On Tue, May 18, 2021 at 6:17 PM Kevin Rushforth <kevin.rushforth at oracle.com>
wrote:

> A very timely question. I was already planning to raise this as a
> discussion after we update our boot JDK to JDK 16 (blocked by the
> in-progress gradle 7 update), which I hope to do later this week.
>
> I think that this is the right time to consider bumping the minimum
> required version to run JavaFX 17 to JDK 16, which would allow us to
> start using APIs and language features from JDK 12 through JDK 16
> inclusive.
>
> In general, we only guarantee that JavaFX N runs on JDK N-1 or later. In
> practice, though, we don't bump it for each release, as there are some
> advantages in being able to run with the latest JDK LTS. Since JavaFX 17
> will release at roughly the same time as JDK 17 LTS, I can't think of a
> good reason to not update our minimum.
>
> Comments?
>
> -- Kevin
>
>
> On 5/18/2021 7:59 AM, Michael Strauß wrote:
> > Currently, JDK 11 is required for the latest version of OpenJFX. What
> > is the policy for bumping this requirement? Does it always correspond
> > to the latest JDK LTS release (the next of which will be JDK 17), or
> > is it independent from the release cycle of OpenJDK?
>
>