OpenJDK Governing Board Minutes: 2023/09/28
The OpenJDK Governing Board met via conference call on Thursday, 28 September 2023 at 15:00 UTC with no initial agenda.
Five Board members were present: Georges Saab, Annette Keenleyside (about 10 minutes late), Andrew Haley, Phil Race, and Mark Reinhold.
The intent of these minutes is to capture the conversational flow of the Board's discussion and also to record decisions. If you are interested only in the latter then search for the word "AGREED" throughout the text.
0. Agenda?
After declaring the meeting quorate, Georges solicited agenda items. Andrew commented that he had not heard of anything. Georges reminded the Board that the quarterly meeting was required per the Bylaws, regardless of whether there were agenda items.
Georges commended everybody who contributed to JDK 21. He reported that the press and social media were saying many good things about the release. Georges thought that there was particular excitement regarding the delivery of Virtual Threads developed by OpenJDK Project Loom commenting that after many years of work, virtual threads had been added to the JDK as a preview feature only six months prior. He added that Loom made the addition of virtual threads look easy, but many people had no idea how difficult it was. Mark said he hoped developers would enjoy how easy concurrent programming is with the new API.
Andrew described his admiration of the entire process of creating the virtual threads JEP including the number of iterations to distill the design, the large number of people involved in creating the specification, and the attention to detail. Georges recalled that the JEP development process was a topic of discussion at the August 2023 OpenJDK Committers' Workshop and asked whether it would be useful to reference that talk. Mark replied that he wished that segment had been recorded, but no part of the unconference was recorded.
Georges provided a brief summary of his impression of Oracle CloudWorld 2023 saying that while it is not primarily a developer-focused conference, technical Java-in-the-cloud content was well-received by the developers present. He thought that next week's Devoxx Belgium looked like an interesting technical conference opportunity. Andrew raised the possibility of FOSDEM 2024 in Brussels as another important conference. He did not have details but said he would pass along anything of interest. Everyone agreed that FOSDEM has historically attracted many JDK Contributors.
In closing Georges thanked everyone for attending and wished them a happy autumn.
At this point, the Board adjourned.