Re: [Netrexx-develop] RxJrt.nrx supporting --add-modules

[René J. <rvj...@xs...>]

Ah this list does not have a reply to list on the default. 

I mentioned to Marc that we can do a conditional compile for this. Java 8 does not support JPMS, so we probably just have that call fail; there is no point in even trying supporting that on Java 8.
Harder part here is that we need to make sure the class file version is compatible specially seen the bootstrapping and ant.  So we might need to do a Class.forName depending on the JVM/Class file version. This might be a strategy to support even older versions - most of NetRexx is Java 1.1 and 1.2 compatible. But it will be a headache for the build process. I am severely disgruntled by what Oracle is doing to Java: Java source code looks uglier than ever, and it became just like Visual Basic to keep up with all the ‘improvements’ in the infrastructure. Removing Applets etc is just vandalism, I have a math course in applets that works fine using appletviewer only that also vanished. And all those security bugs were mostly windows and some were self-inflicted by not thinking straight while implementing invokedynamic.

I see these people breaking everything one day by enforcing those method<type> calls and then we are further away from home. JRuby struggled more than we for Java 9 support, that came about only last week or so. And look at WebSphere. It might be a strategy.

René.




> On 27 Jan 2022, at 14:53, Rony G. Flatscher <Ron...@wu...> wrote:
> 
> On 27.01.2022 13:53, Marc Remes wrote:
>> And a side note..
>> You need java 9 or above to compile and run this.
>> 
>> Which brings up another topic : are we ready to stop supporting java 8?
> 
> Please no, unless you want to remove most of the Java installed base for NetRexx.
> :)
> 
> Seriously, NetRexx should support Java 8 as long as Java 8 gets supported by OpenJDK distributors.
> E.g. Oracle and Azul support Java 8 until December 2030, for very good reasons! Actually Java 8 gets
> currently a longer support than Java 11 LTS and Java 17 LTS, believe it or not.
> 
> [BSF4ooRexx still supports Java 6 as its baseline (that is the reason for "6" in "641", "41" means
> ooRexx baseline is version 4.1) as there are companies/organizations that have still Java 6
> deployed. This incurs quite some overhead and support efforts as in Java 6 one needs to use
> java.lang.reflect whereas starting with Java 9 one must use java.lang.invoke instead (actually
> BSF4ooRexx uses by default java.lang.invoke starting with Java 8 as Java 7, where this package got
> introduced, has some missing support in that area).]
> 
> In general a good overview of the support dates for different versions of Java by different
> distributors can be found here: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_version_history>.
> 
> ---rony
> 
> 
> 
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