Java 7 for Mac OSX (original) (raw)

Mike Swingler swingler at apple.com
Mon Feb 20 11:36:44 PST 2012

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on MacOSX, my colleagues all over the planet and me would be stuck in a very uncomfortable situation of having to use outdated and unmaintained Java.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.

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