Re: Scala IO

Now I haven't studied NIO2 at all,
but given that it does not rely on other Java7 libraries to function, wouldn't it be feasible to just rip it out of OpenJDK and provide it as a Scala extension for any Scala library built on top of it?

On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 4:13 PM, martin odersky <martin.odersky@epfl.ch> wrote:

I think it's great to do a proper Scala IO library! NIO2 looks like it
has many important ideas and clever implementations, so we should
study it in depth and try not to do anything that's imcompatible with
it. On that other hand,
dropping Java 6 support for the main Scala distribution is at least 2
years away.

One possibility might be to work NIO 2 compatibility into the design
but  use simpler implementations, or even mark some methods as only
implemented on Java 7. Clearly this will require more thought...

Cheers

On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 3:30 PM, Viktor Klang wrote:
> Now I haven't studied NIO2 at all,
> but given that it does not rely on other Java7 libraries to function,
> wouldn't it be feasible to just rip it out of OpenJDK and provide it as a
> Scala extension for any Scala library built on top of it?

That's tricky because there are platform dependencies down to the
native level ... this is just one of the reasons why we really want to
leverage NIO2 rather than try and replicate it.

There's a backport to JDK6, but unfortunately only for Linux,

http://code.google.com/p/jsr203-backport/

Cheers,

Miles

It must rely on native methods, therefore "No.".

2009/9/8 Viktor Klang :
> Now I haven't studied NIO2 at all,
> but given that it does not rely on other Java7 libraries to function,
> wouldn't it be feasible to just rip it out of OpenJDK and provide it as a
> Scala extension for any Scala library built on top of it?
>
> On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 4:13 PM, martin odersky
> wrote:
>>
>> I think it's great to do a proper Scala IO library! NIO2 looks like it
>> has many important ideas and clever implementations, so we should
>> study it in depth and try not to do anything that's imcompatible with
>> it. On that other hand,
>> dropping Java 6 support for the main Scala distribution is at least 2
>> years away.
>>
>> One possibility might be to work NIO 2 compatibility into the design
>> but  use simpler implementations, or even mark some methods as only
>> implemented on Java 7. Clearly this will require more thought...
>>
>> Cheers
>>
>>  -- Martin
>
>
>
> --
> Viktor Klang
>
> Blog: klangism.blogspot.com
> Twttr: viktorklang
>
> Lift Committer - liftweb.com
> AKKA Committer - akkasource.org
> Cassidy - github.com/viktorklang/Cassidy.git
> SoftPub founder: http://groups.google.com/group/softpub
>

One possibility might be to work NIO 2 compatibility into the design
but  use simpler implementations, or even mark some methods as only
implemented on Java 7. Clearly this will require more thought...

This sounds promising. Similar issues come up in the design of concurrency libraries for Scala. There are just too many goodies in Java 6/7.

--j