feature request: Java 17 support about hail HOT 2 OPEN

Hi @pettyalex, thank you for the detailed and thoughtful issue. Hopefully I can shed some light and address all your concerns.

I think the assertion on Java 8 and 11 was an overly defensive precaution put in place some time ago, as hail uses some unsafe JVM APIs that have been deprecated for a while. But as you noted, the world goes on in Java 17 and I don't see a reason Hail shouldn't be compatible. Since most of our closest users use Hail on GCP Dataproc, we generally keep in lock-step with their platform which is unfortunately still on Java 11 so that is what we test against and officially support. Nevertheless, we should remove the restriction and add some light validation in CI against Java 17 and advertise it as unofficially supported until such a time that Dataproc moves to Java 17. Hopefully Spark 3.6 will force their hand. The release process for 0.2.129 is already underway but expect this to be resolved in 0.2.130.

Thanks for your suggestions regarding bundling the JRE and the GC options, we'll definitely consider them. Regarding the module-info.class nonsense, my apologies. That just seems like a bug we should fix. I will create a separate tracking issue for that but I'm not yet sure where that will get prioritized. If it is more than an annoyance for you, please let us know.

Regarding conda-forge, I don't think we currently have the bandwidth or demand (that we know of) to add more distribution systems. Again, this is something where hearing from the community is the best way to figure out how to direct our efforts.

Hopefully this addresses your concerns. Please do follow up if I've missed anything or open more issues if you encounter new problems.

from hail.

Thanks,

The module-info.class thing is incredibly unlikely to break any user. I only discovered it because it broke jdeps when I was testing generating a bundled JRE.

None of this directly impacts me or established users of Hail in my group, but I have seen Java version be the single biggest pain point for new users wanting to install and try Hail for the first time, which is why I posted this.

from hail.