FFI JEP

Engines, Libraries and Tools
#1

JEP 191: Foreign Function Interface. If everything goes well, this is going to have major impact to Java gaming.

For those interested in LWJGL development, 3.0 has been designed to be forward compatible with having such functionality present in the JVM. I’ve also given feedback to the JEP’s author (Charles Nutter, of JRuby fame) regarding LWJGL-specific requirements. Together with an official Unsafe that’s also considered for Java 9, this could be the best thing that happened to Java gaming since NIO in JDK 1.4.

#2

Nice. Has anyone seen any more discussion about the making Unsafe a public API (one of those planned things for some vague point in the future if you hadn’t heard). In other upcomming news the memory model is getting an overhaul as well.

#3

I thought making Unsafe public was more of a rumor or wishful thinking, would love to have it confirmed for java 9 though - along with arrays2.0/packed objects.

#4

I can but dream. But it’s great that some progress is being made in these most itchy of pain points.

Cas :slight_smile:

#5

WRT: Unsafe. Mark Reinhold was pointing to a JEP for JRE-9. See here: http://openjdk.5641.n7.nabble.com/Turn-sun-misc-Unsafe-into-a-public-API-td158365.html

One can dream.

#6

Thanks for the link!

I’m cautiously optimistic; I know IBM have experimented with it, and there’s also an oracle presentation floating around somewhere on the internet about it. If it will actually make it into Java 9 though… well, the dreaming is strong in me.

#7

Really hope this makes it into Java ASAP, JNI is a horrid and ugly API and needs to die.

#8

Project Panama. This post by John Rose “describes some of the many questions related to native interconnect, along with some approaches for solving them”.