Last Thursday I had retina surgery number four. This time I had it at Duke in an attempt to change my luck which so far has been pretty poor.

Until the OpenJDK project converts to Bugzilla, I thought some more information about how our internal bug tracking system works might help people watching the current situation.

Last night we drove to Dixon, California and saw the legendary hard rock band ZZ Top.

Here are the few highlights from the talks that I attended today:

Most compilers have some (or in some cases many) intrinsic functions. HotSpot has a number of them (see here, search for "intrinsics known to the runtime") as does the CLR JIT. IKVM has had a couple as well (System.arraycopy(), AtomicReferenceFieldUpdater.newUpdater(), String.toCharArray()). These were sort of hacked into the compiler and I finally decided to clean that up a little and add more scalable support ...

In this year's JavaOne pavilion, you can get shirt's printed with your own answer to this year's conference theme posed as a question

Today Bill, Chihiro, Jaya and I talked on Blu-ray. The talk was centered around the open source project @ http://hdcookbook.dev.java.net - a library and a set of tools to build Blu-ray discs. If you haven't checked out code/docs, you may want to checkout and play with the code. All you need is a laptop with blu-ray drive and a BD-RE disc. Optionally, for added fun you ...

With the magic of Mercurial, you can see changesets, like this one: http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk7/jdk7/hotspot/rev/485d403e94e1. Which Serguei Spitsyn integrated recently.

A while back Sébastien Auvray asked me some questions about the OpenJDK Mercurial conversion. His article was recently published at http://www.infoq.com/articles/dvcs-guide.

In javac land, we're looking at improving the diagnostic messages generated by the compiler ...

Hello, JSR 292 observers and language implementors!

As some of you may know, we've made changes recently to the KSL project that was started last year.

Although it might not be a very good idea to define your management model based on how it will be displayed by a given GUI, such as that provided by JConsole or VisualVM, I believe it is nonetheless interesting to explore the various ways in which a complex type such as a Map<String,Integer> could be modeled and exposed through an MXBean attribute.

I finally was able to run the Gear demo from Jogl with the Classpathescher peer.

Now that the source code for the OpenJDK Regression Test Harness (jtreg) is available, this provides an overview of how jtreg relates to JT Harness.

I'm pleased to announce the release of our second performance release, JDK 6 Update 5-P. Its available to download at http://java.sun.com/performance. This is our fastest JDK to date, released just in time for JavaOne.

A couple of fixes.

[I wrote most of this about a month ago. If I don't post it now, I never will do. I'm sure there were a couple things I meant to add.]

That is, pure java OpenGL, no need of native code, runs everywhere there is an X11 server and does a nice Italian coffee too :)

Huzzah! Through the dedicated efforts of Jon and others, jtreg is now open sourced! The jtreg program is the test harness used to run the regression tests that come with the JDK sources.

The reality for Java is that there are many other programming languages, and many of those have features that Java developers sometimes wish they could access. But its simply impossible to add all those features. Is there a possible alternative if we think 'outside the box'?

A collection of links to various JDK Build readme files.

In JavaOne 2008, there are many intesting sessions on "other" JVM languages covering both dynamically typed languages (JavaScript, Groovy, JRuby) and statically typed languages (JavaFX, Scala). As usual, there are many sessions covering application aspects -- like using scripting on Glassfish, Grials (Groovy), Rails (JRuby) and so on. But, my interest is mostly on the programming language aspects and JVM implementation issues. Here is a ...

Just a quick post to outline my plans for JavaOne.

If you want to learn more about Blu-ray disc and what Java has to do with it, you may want to attend the following talks/BOFs @ JavaOne 2008!

There is a old joke about walking along one night and coming across someone looking down underneath a streetlight for lost keys. Stopping to help look, after a minute or two of searching you remark, "Your keys don't seem to be here. Where did you drop them?" "Well, I dropped them over in that ally, but it's way too dark to look there!"

I've gathered together a few more thoughts on improving the enhanced for-each loops. The basic idea is to take this very popular Java 5 feature and provide the missing parts.

Peter Kriens, the OSGi spec lead and official evangelist, takes a positive view of language-level modularity. His focus on "requirements, not solutions" is especially helpful. Here are some responses to his points:

... while working on uncommitted changes.

Back in JDK 5, JSR 13 added true floating-point arithmetic to BigDecimal, which involved many new methods and constructors along with new supportingclasses in the java.math package. I was actively involved in the JSR 13 expert group and integrated the code into the JDK. These changes had some surprising compatibility impacts which can be classified according to their source, binary, and behavioral effects. ...

Have you ever been fustrated by the new Java 5 for each loop because it didn't operate directly on maps?

Developers are asking where the changesets are, reminds me of that movie Dude, Where's My Car?, "Dude, Where's My Changeset?"

When evolving the JDK, compatibility concerns are taken very seriously. However, different standards are applied to evolving various aspects of the platform. From a certain point of view, it is true that any observable difference could potentially cause some unknown application to break. Indeed, just changing the reported version number is incompatible in this sense because, for example, a JNLP file can refuse to ...

Yeah!

Yesterday Miguel blogged about a nice new feature in Mono. I added the IKVM_VERBOSE_CAST environment variable to IKVM to do something similar a while ago.