JDK releases suggestion (original) (raw)

Mohamed El-Beltagy melbeltagy at gmail.com
Wed Nov 6 21:33:02 UTC 2019

Hi Mark/JDK-DEV team,

I have a suggestion in regards to JDK, if I may. *I do understand that this is a little bit extreme suggestion and I do understand that I might not be fully aware of the consequences. After all, I'm not as expert as you are *:-) But please bare with me and please consider the idea thoroughly.

For the last few of releases of JDK, I noticed that most of the JEPs actually target the JVM, not the language itself. Although they are almost one, they are actually not.

My suggestion is to separate the JVM releases from the language releases. I have different reasons why I am making such a suggestion (I'll try to be as brief as possible):

  1. We have different JVMs and different programming languages that target the JVM. The only common factor is the language specs (i.e., the .class file, not the APIs)

  2. From developers perspective: a) it does not make much sense to have a new Java version that has lots of JVM updates and little to almost none changes to the language. b) using a certain JVM, it doesn't matter what updates other JVMs has. Only language updates matter.

  3. The separation will allow: a) flexible OpenJDK development cycle: each JEP that is not language related, can be directly shipped into the JVM without waiting for the language and hence we don't have to update the language version in the process. b) flexible APIs release: some of the JEPs do not require .class file specification updates. Those can be shipped as a new (minor - maybe?!) version without waiting for the accompanying effort that is related to the JVM JEPs.

Your comments/feedback are appreciated.

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