24 comments

[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 45.0 ms ] thread
A lot more details about carriers and L, and LW1: http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/valhalla-spec-experts...
Background

In MVT, there were separate carrier types (Q and L) for values and references.

Oh right, well that clears that up.

Having Box-es (legacy java.lang.Integer), Lox-es (new lightweight value boxes) and Pox-es (primitive wrapper value classes) and primitives (int-s) would complicate the understanding...

I wish there would just be one (int) or maximum 2 (int.Box)...

We're going through the process of auditing and budgeting for the costs of all our (previously free) Java licenses now.

Not interested in the slightest.

Ever heard of OpenJDK?

Some people just love to hate Oracle.

Yet paying for Sun's support was perfectly fine.

Have you even considered OpenJDK and adoptopenjdk.net ?
???

If you guys are price sensitive, why are you not using OpenJDK? (Not to put too fine a point on it, but you sound commercial, so you guys could even consider contributing to it.)

Haters gonna hate.

Oracle made OpenJDK functionally equal to OracleJDK (including previously commercial only java flight recorder and mission control), but people still complain. At first I thought this was an issue in Oracle's communication strategy, but I started to think this is ignorance on the receivers end.

Yup. We are switching to openjdk 11 from Oracle 8. We used none of the commercial features and really only used the Oracle jdk because it was easy to install.

If you want support, there area ton of other jdks for cheaper (like azul).

You're quite happy with only getting security patches for 6 months from release? Really?
It is only Oracle that is limiting security patches to 6 months. Others don't necessarily have that limitation. Check out Adopt OpenJDK.
Excusers gonna excuse.

Oracle dumped features on the community and fired the supporting employees (e.g. mission control). They stopped supporting fully open projects to pivot towards ones with commercial editions (e.g. nashorn). They sued a reimplementer of their language, actively continue to keep things like the JCK hidden/non-open, reduce the age of JDK editions they'll help support, add confusing language around costs and use restrictions for their edition, etc. They are the only popular language stewards I know that continue to find any way they can to make a buck on the language itself and they reduce maintenance efforts at the same time.

Add to this their actively hostile treatment of users/developers in other segments of their business and it amazes me how many rush to their defense. "Look at all the new JVM features," they say, as though other language stewards can't do the same without all the bullshit. There's plenty to complain about without assuming ignorance on the complainers part.

Nashorn doesn't have a commercial edition and it's being deprecated in favour of GraalJS which is fully open source too.

The JCK is also open source now I think.

Reduce the age of the editions they'll help support - no, there are still LTS releases. Maybe they're supported for a few less years than Java 8 was but that's not unreasonable.

Your final complaint appears to be just "they're trying to make Java financially sustainable" which is hardly a problem, the lack of that is why Sun went down in the first place.

> Nashorn doesn't have a commercial edition and it's being deprecated in favour of GraalJS which is fully open source too.

Right, Graal has commercial versions and doesn't have community ownership.

> The JCK is also open source now I think.

No. I think you're making the same mistake as many and confusing the Java EE TCK with the Java TCK that was refused to Harmony and is non-open.

> Reduce the age of the editions they'll help support - no [...] Maybe they're supported for a few less years

A clear self-contradiction, and my point exactly.

> Your final complaint appears to be just "they're trying to make Java financially sustainable" which is hardly a problem, the lack of that is why Sun went down in the first place.

I think it is a problem. Languages these days cannot expect to be financially sustainable in and of themselves as it only incentivizes non-free actions against its users/developers. Sun's problem was not realizing this and their inability to be financially sustainable enough outside of the language to fund its development. Oracle won't have that problem, they'll take their pound of flesh from the language itself, free maintenance/support be damned. It might seem impractical to expect free language/runtime development paid by the stewards and with no cost on the developers, but it's clearly the only way to keep the ecosystem thriving sans perverse incentives.

OpenJDK only gets 6 months of security patches. Try again.
I can understand you not being up to date on this, because the story has been too murky for too long, but that's not the case. See:

https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2018/09/24/the-future-of-...

tl;dr: Oracle will maintain the latest release of the OpenJDK codebase. The community (in practice, Red Hat) will backport security fixes from that to the current LTS codebase. AdoptOpenJDK and others will release builds of the current LTS codebase.

If you’re still wading through Java in 2018, I want you to know you’re in my thoughts and prayers.