Hello BSD developers, I see on openjdk we'll have more platforms - except BSD, MacOS, there is discussions about AIX. This is great news to the community, as well as a new challenge to the community to manage different native implementation for new added platform as well as early platform. The challenges we may face are: 1. in current implementation, we have native implementation in windows/linux/solaris directory, and create some same jni methods. But actually they have the same or very similar logic. This is not very manageable. If some logic is change we need to modify implementation on all platforms. and may cause some of problem as no one knows all platforms differences, and the platform developers need to understand the logic before the modification, it may be a extra work for developers like BSD/AIX engineers. 2. different platforms offers different system APIs, and even different versions of system have different APIs; in current implementation I see some code like #ifdef someplatform use some API #endif This increases the complexity of the code, and make code ugly. Also the developer may have much trouble to read and modify if necessary. 3. Openjdk is working on project digjaw/modularization, it may meet some trouble if the native API and logic are separated by platform level, not in functional level.
I am wondering if a port layer, leave all APIs differences in this layer. The jni developers can use this unified API, like "int write(fd, byte[])" should work on all platforms openjdk supported, including BSD/linux, windows, MacOS etc. This may help us the developers: 1. the platform developer can focus on covering the API difference and care nothing of the upper logical - say, e.g, focus on write some given bytes into the give fd, do not care what the fd is and how to deal with the buffers etc, so we will write it only once, and only update for new APIs when necessary. Meanwhile, the classlib developers can use an unified system API and focus on the logic, we write the code once for all platforms. It save time and effort on both side. 2. The code is then clear, no #endif is required, this helps the developer to read and understand, and much easier to modify. 3. it may help to modularize the jdk as well. An new portlib may also have some problems, like modification on the current code, and performance. We need to define the portlayer well, and make excellent build script to avoid performance degradation of the layer. However, in the long run, the portlayer will really help the developers as well as JDK, like some other opensource jdk do. I believe the portlayer would help BSD developers a lot in code maintenance, and when updating new features. I'd like to listen to your opinions/comments/suggestions on this topic. Thanks! -- Best Regards, Jimmy, Jing LV
