Minimum JDK policy for OpenJFX

[Nir Lisker]

I looked at jextract a while back. I got the impression that it's more
useful when you need to generate new bindings, at the very least because
there are fewer ways to make mistakes. Most of the work on JavaFX has
already been done in this area and the mistakes have been found and fixed
by now, so is there any substantial value in redoing it with jextract?

On Thu, May 20, 2021 at 12:25 AM Ty Young <youngty1997 at gmail.com> wrote:

> If you want to learn more about Panama you can read the JEP page:
>
>
> https://openjdk.java.net/jeps/412
>
>
> You can also join the panama-dev list and ask questions:
>
>
> https://mail.openjdk.java.net/mailman/listinfo/panama-dev
>
>
> Biggest things for JavaFX that I can think of is jextract, a tool for
> generating Java headers from a C header, and having all binding code
> written in Java. It may be easier to upgrade to newer GTK versions using
> Panama as there is no C shim required and the bindings are, again,
> generated for you. jextract does have issues, one of which is that any
> binding generated using it are platform-specific even if the library
> itself is cross-platform. You can make bindings by hand that are
> cross-platform if you want, though.
>
>
> Speaking of GTK, when is JavaFX going to support GTK4?
>
>
>
>
> On 5/18/21 4:42 PM, Nir Lisker wrote:
> >> 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?
> >>
>