Project Panama: Interconnecting JVM and native code
We are improving and enriching the connections between the Java virtual machine and well-defined but “foreign” (non-Java) APIs, including many interfaces commonly used by C programmers.
To this end, Project Panama will include most or all of these components:
- native function calling from JVM
- native data access from JVM or inside JVM heap
- new data layouts in JVM heap
- native metadata definition for JVM
- header file API extraction tools (jextract)
- native library management APIs
- native-oriented interpreter and runtime “hooks”
- class and method resolution “hooks”
- native-oriented JIT optimizations
- tooling or wrapper interposition for safety
- exploratory work with difficult-to-integrate native libraries
Community
This Project is sponsored by the Hotspot Group.
- Mailing lists & News
- panama-dev — Foreign Function & Memory API, Vector API
- jextract-dev — jextract tool
- Stay tuned on latest Panama development at Inside.java
- Design documents
- Panama foreign memory acccess
- Panama foreign function support
- Panama jextract usage examples
- early problem space overview: the isthmus in the VM
- JEPs
- Talks
Repository organization
Project Panama is designed to incubate a series of components for eventual inclusion in the JDK, via curated merge. Project Panama features are being actively developed in the following repositories:
- Panama foreign support, which adds support for foreign memory access, as well as for foreign function calls;
- Panama vector support, which adds vectorization support in Java through JVM intriniscs; and
- jextract, a tool which mechanically generate Java bindings from native library headers.
The legacy Panama repository is also available here, although we do not expect to carry out further work there; as such this repository should not be used (and in the future we might make this more explicit by marking the legacy repository as read-only).
