strangenoises

22july2013 said:

rcfa said:

So, for all these years there was no arm64 version of a JVM?

I don't think Apple Silicon has the exact same instruction set as Arm. It's a variant that Apple has a license to create.

my understanding is that it *is* aarch64, that's the license they paid for. but it's their own implementation. Think of it like Intel and AMD each having their own implementations of the x86_64 instruction set... The extensions are probably to access the extra stuff their silicon does, like neural engine/ML and Secure Enclave etc.

22july2013 said:

Will this port of JRE be available through the App Store? And if not, will installation of this JRE through manual downloading and installation be accompanied by any warnings from Apple, perhaps like the Digital Signature from Apple being absent? And will it require admin privilege to install?

No and no.

These days, as a user, potentially of a Java app, you won't be asked to install a JRE. Rather, one will be packaged and embedded with the app, stripped down to just the parts that that app depends upon. It won't otherwise touch the system, handle jar files, url types, or anything, unless the app itself is coded to. Applets died many years ago, and for a while WebStart (launching desktop apps from websites) was the only reason to have a JRE, but that's gone now too. In summary, apps should basically come with their own JRE embedded within and you wouldn't even know without opening the app bundle and looking for it.

As a developer, easiest way these days is to install it from AdoptOpenJDK.net, optionally via Homebrew, but you can also just download the OpenJDK build directly and unpack the tarball to anywhere you want, or if you want to be liable for their fees, download it from Oracle. Either way, it's all signed and notarised, and apps you write on your system you can run on your system without any problem. For packaging for customers/end-users, to run on the Mac you need to code sign and notarise the resulting app bundle as yourself with an Apple developer ID, just as with any other Mac app.

I don't expect any of this to be different with ARM Macs, once the actual port is done and AdoptOpenJDK have a system set up to build and test theirs on.

rcfa said:

So, for all these years there was no arm64 version of a JVM?

There has been, for linux/aarch64.

What with that and the macos/x64 support both being around for ages, I suppose it was too much to hope you could just git clone and run the build on a DTK to get macos/aarch64 😉 

rob53 said:

Why? Java isn't going to make use of all the Apple-specific capabilities, it's just going to continue to run on Macs. What Java applications do people even use anymore?

I code Java for a living, and Groovy too, increasingly, and Kotlin's on the horizon. All JVM languages. But I use Macs to do it, by *strong* preference. It's not the primary target platform for the products I'm working on (although it runs on it just fine), but it's the one I choose to use to do the work. I could fall back to Linux or Windows (in order of preference), but I'd rather not. And as long as I don't have to, I'm still in the market for shiny new apple kit on a regular basis. And there's lots like me.

Of course part of me remembers Steve Jobs promising that Java was going to be an equal first class citizen for writing Mac apps, back when OSX came out. But <sigh/>.

little thing while listening to the podcast, the bit about an "ocr for text written in longhand through Pencil" and the immediate reminiscing about the Newton.

I remember the Newton, though I didn't have one myself; but what I remember was that its handwriting recognition worked *perfectly* for me, despite my handwriting always being, truly, truly, awful.

The epiphany came talking to a friend from Taiwan, talking about writing chinese characters. *stroke order* is critically important when learning to write these characters. And I realised... although my handwriting had even by that point degenerated into an awful scrawl (it was *never* good, much worse now), I had nevertheless learned how to do it using a classic cursive handwriting method, which meant my *stroke order* - that is, the order and direction in which you draw the various lines and curves of each letter, and the joins between them - was completely classical, completely orthogonal, and the Newton's handwriting algorithms just loved me. (And i never reciprocated: I was never rich enough back then to buy one.)

But it's not what your handwriting *looks* like, it's how you draw it, as an event that transpires over time.