On Jul 10, 2011, at 4:04 PM, Johannes Schindelin wrote: > Hi, > > On Sun, 10 Jul 2011, Mike Swingler wrote: > >> Just to set some expectations, the Mac OS X porting project has made a >> conscious decision to not support Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard (for a variety >> of API reasons), and therefore will not support PPC. > > That rather shatters one of my dreams: a fully compatible Java 6 for > Leopard (PPC). Given that there was Java 6 for Leopard (x86_64) I allowed > myself to think that would be not unrealistic.
The graphics machinery we have used in Java 1.4, 1.5, and 1.6 on Mac OS X is simply not compatible with cross-process rendering required for modern browser plug-ins. While it can be done inefficiently (as we do today), we have chosen to use a CoreAnimation-based OpenGL strategy for OpenJDK that allows accelerated graphics throughout the entire pipe, and relies on API that is only in Snow Leopard. Also, we are re-writing most of the JNI code that call into Cocoa using Blocks, which is a language feature which was added in 10.6. Without using Blocks, the resulting Cocoa and JNI code is a tangled mess of selectors, callbacks, and awkward parameter marshaling. We never enjoy dropping entire configurations, but in this case the benefits far outweighed the effort to keep Leopard alive. Sorry, Mike Swingler Java Engineering Apple Inc.
