Summary of FFM changes by Java Release

[Lee Rhodes]

Hi Daniel & Maurizio,

Thank you, both!

Sheesh! I feel dumb that I have never explored the "new" tab in the
javadocs. The "Search" box at the top of the page is not useful for this
quest, but pulling up the browser page search (command-f) is perfect.
Searching for "java.lang.foreign" I can quickly see that since 22 only two
methods were added in 23: MemorySegment.maxByteAlignment()
and SymbolLookup.findOrThrow(String).

The Java Almanac is new to me and amazing! It provides much more detail,
such as removed methods! Cool! The only thing that would be useful would be
the ability to collapse nodes of the tree, but, hey, I can live with the
way it is!
(Thank you, Marc Hoffmann, et al!)

The reason this is so useful is that as an author of the open source
library datasketches.apache.org, I have to support multiple versions of
Java: currently 8, 11, 17, 21, and eventually 25.  Sadly, MR-JARs don't
really solve the problem and I've had to resort to separate releases for
each LTS version.

Cheers,
Lee.


On Thu, Apr 10, 2025 at 2:02 PM Daniel Jarabek <jarabekit at gmail.com> wrote:

> https://javaalmanac.io does provide member-level API diffs between given
> Java versions (as well as links to relevant docs and CSRs).
>
> For example, on https://javaalmanac.io/jdk/24/apidiff/19/ you can see
> the changes in the API between Java 19 and 24. Changes before Java 19
> aren't visible as incubating modules don't seem to be tracked.
>
> -DJ
>
> On 4/10/25 16:53, Maurizio Cimadamore wrote:
> > Hi Lee,
> > when features are incubating or previewing, there's typically no release
> > notes associated with them -- as it's taken for granted that might
> > change (esp. preview APIs).
> >
> > One way to have a glance at which APIs have been added in a given
> > release is to look at javadoc itself:
> >
> > https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/24/docs/api/new-list.html
> >
> > Unfortunately, while this is a good tool to show what has been added and
> > when, the information it shows is not fine-grained enough, so you can't
> > see e.g. which API methods changed.
> >
> > Another, more detailed way to look at FFM-related API changes is to look
> > at the CSR associated with the PR that we created for that release. For
> > instance, here's the first preview for Java 21:
> >
> > https://bugs.openjdk.org/browse/JDK-8282192
> >
> > (you can find CSR for all the releases of FFM, even the incubating ones).
> >
> > Each CSR has a (browsable) "specdiff" attachment which shows the
> > differences between the old API and the new one.
> >
> > This way you can reconstruct the whole API history -- it's not
> > automated, sadly, but it's better than nothing :-)
> >
> > I hope this helps.
> >
> > Maurizio
> >
> >
> >
> > On 10/04/2025 19:51, Lee Rhodes wrote:
> >> Where can I find the release notes for just FFM by Java release.
> >>
> >> In other words, I would like to track the changes to just FFM from
> >> Java 17 onwards.
> >>
> >> Thanks,
> >> Lee.
> >>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://mail.openjdk.org/pipermail/panama-dev/attachments/20250410/4eecc298/attachment.htm>