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by lye 726 days ago
As far as I'm aware, the only officially supported way of shipping Java applications is by building custom runtimes with jlink. So if you want to play by the rules, it doesn't matter what the distributions ship.

Ubuntu ships multiple runtimes for every supported distribution and does backports FWIW.
1 comments
hiAndrewQuinn 726 days ago
`jlink` was released for Java 9, I believe, so it's unlikely people who are upgrading from Java 8 already have the infrastructure in place to seamlessly transition to that instead of however they were managing their JAR files before.

"But this should be simple! It's almost like a Go binary!" I've learned not to underestimate how long it can take to change infrastructure. DevOps isn't seen as a profit center in most places, and they might well have much bigger things to worry about than transitioning from a kind of working JARs-on-VMs approach.

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vips7L 726 days ago
Jlink/jpackage UX isnt the best either. They mostly produce installers not a single binary that you can just run. Project Leyden has some interesting work around this called Hermetic Java which plans to ship one binary with the VM + jar together. It’s coming out of some folks at Google. I’m really looking forward to it.
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hiAndrewQuinn 725 days ago
Really now? Now that's interesting. I thought GraalVM might be a good option in that space https://www.graalvm.org/ last I checked, but something literally called Hermetic Java has my interest piqued.
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vips7L 725 days ago
GraalVM creates native AOT compiled binaries. The goal of hermetic is to ship the normal JVM. This is where is started a year ago: https://cr.openjdk.org/~jiangli/hermetic_java.pdf

I’ve been mildly watching the mailing list and they’ve had small progress.

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