FFM goes final!

[Radosław Smogura]

Hi,

Congratulations Maurizio, rest of JDK team and all people involved!

Best regards,
Rado

> On 20 Oct 2023, at 13:18, Maurizio Cimadamore <maurizio.cimadamore at oracle.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> As some of you might know, JEP 454 has landed in the JDK repository and the FFM API is no longer a preview API :-)
> 
> A binary snapshot containing the Java 22 changes is available here:
> 
> https://jdk.java.net/22/
> 
> And, a jextract branch to go with it is also available here:
> 
> https://github.com/openjdk/jextract/tree/jdk22
> 
> Over the last few months the focus has been on further polishing the rough edges of the API. We have just published a PR [1] which enhances the "critical" linker option so that heap segments can be passed directly to native code (w/o copy). We believe this further enhancement should bring some benefits for legacy APIs that are "stuck" dealing with byte arrays, but need to interop with native code.
> 
> We have also been working on the tooling aspect of restricted methods, adding support for restricted method warnings in javac [2] and also adding better javadoc support for restricted methods [3].
> 
> It is also nice to see the first attempts at using FFM within the JDK itself [4], we hope this trend is one that will continue.
> 
> Of course, finalizing the API doesn't mean we're done (is there ever such a thing?). We are actively exploring ways to model foreign data with records, and we plan to make more progress on improving the startup of FFM clients. More longer term, there's a lot of interesting synergies to look forward to, from structured arenas (Loom) to better support for unsigned types (Valhalla). Plenty of exciting stuff to work on still!
> 
> We'd also like to take a moment to thank all of you. It is a privilege to be in a position to improve the Java platform, and one that we do not take lightly. But, without your help, all our efforts will be in vain. So we're very grateful for the feedback you have provided along the way, in every shape or form, be it a bug report, a benchmark or even just a "git checkout" to see what's up. You are the pulsating heart of what we call Java. Please keep it up, and keep helping us making Java a better language/platform.
> 
> Cheers
> Maurizio
> 
> [1] - https://git.openjdk.org/jdk/pull/16201
> [2] - https://git.openjdk.org/jdk/pull/15964
> [3] - https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/pull/16188
> [4] - https://git.openjdk.org/jdk/pull/15476
> 
>