JDK releases suggestion (original) (raw)

Andrew Haley aph at redhat.com
Thu Nov 7 09:56:03 UTC 2019

On 11/6/19 9:33 PM, Mohamed El-Beltagy wrote:

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):

This post made me smile, not because you're joking but because it's what we used to do. We had a project called HotSpot Express, and it did more or less what you're suggesting. It was OK, but there were problems. In particular it was necessary to keep interfaces between the library and the VM stable, and this in effect standardized the interface.

These days the JVM and the language are changing rapidly. It's frequently necessary to make JVM and language changes together, and this makes maintaining a stable library interface and asynchronous development of both impractical. We want to make frequent releases in order to move the platform forward.

Finally, a couple of recent JDK releases have been rather feature light but that's OK. When we moved to time-based releases we knew that there'd occasionally be such things. How many features land in a particular release is to some accident a matter of happenstance.

-- Andrew Haley (he/him) Java Platform Lead Engineer Red Hat UK Ltd. <https://www.redhat.com> https://keybase.io/andrewhaley EAC8 43EB D3EF DB98 CC77 2FAD A5CD 6035 332F A671

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