Native Image Committer Community Meeting 2022-06-02

[christianwimmer]

List of all past and upcoming meetings: #3933

New and Noteworthy

• GraalVM 22.2 feature freeze is on June 10

• Compatibility improvements
  [GR-37582] Default to running image-builder on module path. #4468
  [GR-38011] Parse annotations without intializing them. #4614
  4f395cd Remove hosted annotations from getAnnotation method
  [GR-38660] Add -o APIOption for -H:Name #4615

• Reduce memory footprint of the image generator
  9a1ebd0 Remove clones for default points-to analysis
  [GR-38184] Simplify type state. #4538

• Other
  [GR-37501] Remove NodeClass from SubstrateType. #4540
  7aaa527 Move TRUFFLE_API dependency to com.oracle.svm.truffle project
  0e2816d Lazily walk continuation stacks during GC (if still reachable)

• Agent
  6e3bfdb Avoid GetLocalInt() for Array.newInstance and prefer GetLocalInstance over GetLocalObject

• Debugging
  [GR-38416] Implement debug location info #4505
  [GR-38835] Add hosted options SourceLevelDebug and SourceLevelDebugFilter. #4597

Deep Dive: What is missing in the Native Image API

All of the microservice frameworks currently depend on internals of the image generator. That breaks easily, and with the upcoming module system encapsulation of the image generator it will be necessary to open up the image generator module and export those packages.

And more importantly, we want to stop publishing svm.jar on Maven (#4146)

Where to look for usages of com.oracle.svm?

• Quarkus: all projects in org https://github.com/quarkusio/
• Micronaut: all projects in org https://github.com/micronaut-projects/
• Spring: https://github.com/spring-projects-experimental/spring-native
• Helidon: https://github.com/oracle/helidon

AutomaticFeature

While the Feature interface is API, the annotation AutomaticFeature is not in the API. That is intentional: if a feature is necessary, then it should be added via the --features=... option in a native-image.properties file.

Substitution system annotations (Substitute, Alias, TargetClass, ...)

Move it into the API module, but explicitly document it as not being supported API (because it is dangerous low-level functionality)?

JNI / Resource / Proxy / Serialization registration

Currently not exposed as public API, but really for no good reason. We have the reflection registration already in the API.

Random other things

SystemPropertiesSupport
LocalizationFeature
SerializationFeature

Use of Non-API options

All -H: options are not API. Which options should be promoted to API options?

Possible deep dive topics for next meeting

Please send suggestions, or "upvote" a suggestion, by adding a comment to this discussion.

• How to write "AOT friendly" Java code