New candidate JEP: 362: Deprecate the Solaris and SPARC Ports (original) (raw)

Roman Kennke roman at kennke.org
Wed Nov 6 14:46:42 UTC 2019

I wish Shark wouldn't have fallen into oblivion [2] as using LLVM is a really good idea in order to achieve both portability and reasonable performance which is why LLVM is popular with other languages like Rust, Swift, Julia and many more [3].

Shark was a good idea (it was -- partly -- my idea) but it couldn't keep up. It might not be a bad idea to create a "modern" Shark, perhaps along the lines of Azul's Falcon. What was the main reason it couldn't keep up? Lack of interest or was it that OpenJDK changed too much low-level code too often? LLVM, especially its JIT support, was horribly unstable. The only way to get a bug fixed was to "wait for the next release", at which point something else would break, repeat ad nauseam. We'd have had to fork LLVM and tried to stabilize the silly thing. Also, the support for garbage collection was awful. I believe this is fixed now. Later on they rewrote the JIT support and I hear it's much better. In hindsight LLVM just wasn't ready, and was oversold.

Yes, all that. Plus, in the meantime we've got JVMCI. Any reasonable way forward with LLVM/Shark would have amounted to a rewrite anyway, using JVMCI, using the new LLVM JIT and GC stuff, and so on.

Roman

More information about the jdk-dev mailing list