Java 7 for Mac OSX

[Mike Swingler]

On Feb 20, 2012, at 11:08 AM, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

> Hi Mike,
> 
> On Mon, 20 Feb 2012, Mike Swingler wrote:
> 
>> On Feb 20, 2012, at 3:29 AM, Henri Gomez wrote:
>> 
>>>> One question:
>>>> 
>>>> By adding 32-bit support, do you mean the binary will be runnable on
>>>> a 32-bit machine? Or, the sources can be built on a 32-bit machine?
>>> 
>>> To me 32 bit support means you could use -d32 flag to have JVM works
>>> in a 32bit land, so safe memory in many cases.
>> 
>> Supporting a second architecture effectively doubles the testing
>> overhead, and basically doubles the budget you need to spend on QA. What
>> is the benefit to Oracle Corp for supporting a legacy architecture?
>> 
>> This is a serious question,
> 
> Thanks for keeping the discussion civilized :-)
> 
> In my line of work, it is extremely important that Java -- especially on
> MacOSX -- continues to work in 32-bit mode. The reason is that we
> frequently need to connect to microscope vendors' native libraries to
> control their hardware, and for some reason most of these vendors are
> unwilling or unable to provide 64-bit libraries.
> 
> To a lesser extent, the increased memory-requirements of 64-bit Java would
> hurt, too; I suspect a few of the Java components we use to allocate, and
> forget about, metric tons of objects per second.
> 
> Without having Java/32-bit working on MacOSX, my colleagues all over the
> planet and me would be stuck in a very uncomfortable situation of having
> to use outdated and unmaintained Java.

Since you'll have to bundle the JRE in your app anyway, would it be sufficient to simply compile the JRE for 32-bit from the OpenJDK sources? Is there a reason you need Oracle's proprietary binary?

Regards,
Mike Swingler
Apple Inc.