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Red Hat Devs Working On ARM64 OpenJDK Port
hypnosec writes "Developers over at Red Hat are busy porting OpenJDK to ARM's latest 64-bit architecture — the ARMv8, also known as the AArch64. The current OpenJDK ARM situation is rather unsatisfactory: for the current 32-bit ARM processors, there are two versions of the HotSpot JVM for OpenJDK — Oracle's proprietary JIT, and a less sophisticated free JIT that performs poorly in comparison. To avoid a similar situation for the 64-bit platform, the developers are working on an entirely Free Software port of HotSpot to 64-bit ARM."
This is excellent news.
It will also be awesome when OpenJDK is ported to Android (it'll probably never make it to iOS due to Apple blocking it, which is a real shame). The IcedRobot project is attempting to do this. Just image, if you could write your application in Java and it would work nearly seamlessly on all the Windows, Linux, Unix, Mac, BSD and Android devices you have to look after. Sure, there are gotchas on each platform but you are usually 99% of the way there (at least, that has been my experience) and your unit and integration tests allow you to quickly find and address any platform quirks.
For all its flaws (and it certainly has them) Java's goal of having a single enterprise-quality language (and, far more importantly, a broad amount of *standardized* libraries ) available on all platforms is a great thing. Only those companies with an vested interest in keeping the IT world silo-ed in islands resist such standardization. Sure, innnovate in your own languages but don't try and balkanize or block standard Java on your platform. Most of us want to amortize their development investment across multiple platforms (and the broadest swathe of the market), and making us use niche tools just for only your platform is painful for us. Our ideal is to develop once and sell everywhere. Portability is what made C great, and for modern development is the single most important feature of Java as a language for huge-scale development projects (nothing else comes close; other languages are portable but their libraries are often not).
Go RedHat!
ps. queue the Java haters. For me the language is less important than the goal: Write Once Run Everywhere (& Test Everywhere, this is the real world after all). Skilled Java developers can get pretty damn close to this ideal.