New candidate JEP: 335: Deprecate the Nashorn JavaScript Engine (original) (raw)

mark.reinhold at oracle.com mark.reinhold at oracle.com
Tue Jun 12 14:55:32 UTC 2018

I’d like to clarify two points about this JEP [1].

First, this is not a proposal to remove Nashorn in any particular JDK release -- it’s just a proposal to deprecate Nashorn, most likely in JDK 11, to enable its potential removal in some later release, yet to be determined. No one needs to worry that applications that use Nashorn won’t run on JDK 11.

Second, the principal purpose of this JEP was to prompt a wide discussion about the future of Nashorn -- as indeed it has. (Could this have been done more gracefully? Sure. We’ll remember that for next time.)

Most of the developers who originally built Nashorn are now working on even newer features, so naturally they’re trying to reduce the amount of time that they spend maintaining Nashorn.

The question behind JEP 335 is, simply, this: Does anyone wish to take on the maintenance of Nashorn after JDK 11? (We asked much the same question about the CMS garbage collector, almost a year ago [2]).

If a set of credible developers expresses a clear desire to maintain Nashorn after JDK 11 then all of us who work on this code base will find a way to make that happen. Maybe Nashorn stays in the JDK, or maybe it’s removed from the JDK and maintained in some other OpenJDK Project and published to Maven Central, or maybe some completely different approach is taken. Exactly what happens depends, mostly, on who shows up.

So ... any takers?

[1] http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/335 [2] http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/hotspot-gc-dev/2016-July/018545.html

More information about the jdk-dev mailing list