> On Feb 20, 2015, at 19:34, David DeHaven <david.deha...@oracle.com> wrote: >> >> Please excuse my ignorance, but >> >> Why? >> And what's the difference? > > .dylib is the standard extension used by the dynamic loader on OSX, .jnilib > was originally used by Apples JRE specifically for JNI libraries and (I > believe) we’ve never really supported it except to allow legacy applications > to continue to work. We certainly no longer use it internally. For example, > there was a time (before the OSX port was done) when it was used in JavaFX. > When 7u6 was released and Oracle took over ownership of the OSX JRE, we > switched everything over. > > There is no functional difference, the files are exactly the same except > there’s no guarantee that .jnilib will continue to be supported. And look at > the loading mechanism in jdk; loading a JNI lib will first attempt to load > using the .dylib extension then fall back on .jnilib for legacy support, so > there’s a (admittedly pretty small) performance consideration since it has to > do extra work to load a .jnilib library.
Thanks, David. So just to recap: They both are identical in content, it's just the file extension that's different. Cheers, -hendrik
