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

[Marc R. <re...@gm...>]

It's the chicken and the egg.

You cannot access the JPMS API (ModuleFinder.of, ModuleReference etc) from Java 8.
With NRX 4.02 we only checked if the 'jrt:' URI is present, which is possible in Java 8.

Indeed the build process will be a headache.

Marc

On 1/27/22 15:24, René Jansen wrote:
> 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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