Fwd: JMOD, native libraries and the packaging of JavaFX

[Samuel Audet]

Hi,

Thanks for your interest! I'm always trying to do all that I can, but 
I'm pretty much just one guy working on this part-time...

Besides, this is the kind of thing that should be standardized in the 
JDK, and Oracle isn't exactly low in resources ($9 billion net income 
last year, wow), so what's the issue? I'm still trying to figure out the 
politics and I doubt that one more page about something is going to make 
a great deal of a difference...

Samuel

On 05/08/2018 09:40 PM, Mike Hearn wrote:
> Thanks Samuel! I wasn't familiar with JavaCPP before, that sounds like a 
> great project.
> 
> You are right that there's a lot of overlap here with other efforts, and 
> that standardising some basic things like JAR locations is the right 
> place to begin. I suspect a JEP requires actual changes to OpenJDK to be 
> valid, so a JEP that just proposes whatever JavaCPP does as a convention 
> wouldn't go anywhere.
> 
> Perhaps integrating JavaCPP's loading mechanism with JavaFX is a good 
> next step, as the community can then learn about it through that and may 
> follow the lead of JavaFX. I suppose someone would have to convince 
> Kevin Rushforth.
> 
> Samuel - what you could also do is write a one-page "standards document" 
> that describes where exactly JavaCPP puts things on the file system, the 
> algorithm it uses for selecting locations and cache keys, etc, so other 
> projects that unpack libraries to disk can share the same cache 
> location. That would lay the groundwork for it either becoming a widely 
> adopted convention, and/or becoming a future Java standard, and/or being 
> encapsulated in a NativeLoader in future if such an API is added to the 
> Java platform. The Loader class could also be split out into a separate 
> module/project.
> 
> The Panama/nicl JEP makes mention of improvements to native code loading 
> and discovery. It seems most of the effort in Panama is currently 
> related to vector support. If I were Mr Rose or Mr Reinhold I'd be 
> tempted to try and un-bundle better loading from the rest of the nicl 
> project so it can ship earlier. A NativeLoader style API would be a 
> smaller change to the JVM than all of the binding layer together.
>