warp VS runtimelab

jpackage is not the only tool for bundling Java. There is also warp-packer, an open-source tool to create self-contained binary applications from Node.js, .NET Core, and Java. warp-packer requires a similar workflow to Method 2, where you create your modified Java Runtime image and an executable script before bundling everything together into an executable.

https://github.com/dgiagio/warp just googled it, no direct experience

KeenWrite is my free, open-source, cross-platform desktop Markdown text editor developed using JavaFX. The installer script uses warp-packer to create installation-free self-extracting binaries for Windows and Linux.

My desktop text editor[1] is written using JavaFX and leans on Warp Packer[2] to create installer-free, multi-platform executable binaries (without jlink). A user contributed a new dark theme[3], which blends nicely with the desktop.

The JavaFX-based WebView (an HTML rendering component) is lauded, but has no direct API to control the scroll position and is itself a memory hog. Scrolling must be handled through JavaScript, and that indirection is as unwieldy as you can probably imagine. FlyingSaucer is a workable alternative to WebView, but comes with numerous technical issues that rear themselves when embedding a Swing widget inside a JavaFX application---as I discovered during development.

Were I to start from scratch, I would definitely seek out alternative cross-platform programming languages for desktop application development.

[1]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite

[2]: https://github.com/dgiagio/warp

[3]: https://i.ibb.co/QpqS0NS/screenshot.png

"Java -- possible, but you'll need a startup script to just call java -jar some-tool.jar; (also not a good fit for short-lived tools, mainly due to startup times;)"

Two technologies to look at:

* Warp Packer -- https://github.com/dgiagio/warp/

* Liberica Native Image Kit -- https://bell-sw.com/pages/liberica-native-image-kit/

Warp Packer bundles my JavaFX desktop application, KeenWrite into single binary executable files:

* https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite/releases/download/2.... (Linux)

* https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite/releases/download/2.... (Windows)

* https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite/releases/download/2....

The start-up time for the first launch of the .bin or .exe is slow because it unpacks to a user directory. Subsequent starts are fine enough, even when running from the command-line as a short-lived task. Here's the script that creates the self-contained executable files:

https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite/blob/master/installe...

To create a release for all three files, I run a single shell script from a build machine:

https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite/blob/master/release....

I could probably generate a binary for MacOS, but not enough people have asked.

There was a "green thread" experiment for dotnet a while ago, here is the conclusion: https://github.com/dotnet/runtimelab/issues/2398

Experiment result write-up: https://github.com/dotnet/runtimelab/blob/e69dda51c7d796b812...

TLDR: The green threads experiment was a failure as it found (expected and obvious) issues that the Java applications are now getting to enjoy, joining their Go colleagues, while also requiring breaking changes. It, however, gave inspiration to subsequent re-examination of current async/await implementation and whether it can be improved by moving state machine generation and execution away from IL completely to runtime. It was a massive success as evidenced by preliminary overhead estimations in the results.

Yeah, it kind of is. There are quite a few of experiments that are conducted to see if they show promise in the prototype form and then are taken further for proper integration if they do.

Unfortunately, object stack allocation was not one of them even though DOTNET_JitObjectStackAllocation configuration knob exists today, enabling it makes zero impact as it almost never kicks in. By the end of the experiment[0], it was concluded that before investing effort in this kind of feature becomes profitable given how a lot of C# code is written, there are many other lower hanging fruits.

To contrast this, in continuation to green threads experiment, a runtime handled tasks experiment[1] which moves async state machine handling from IL emitted by Roslyn to special-cased methods and then handling purely in runtime code has been a massive success and is now being worked on to be integrated in one of the future version of .NET (hopefully 10?)

[0] https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/11192

[1] https://github.com/dotnet/runtimelab/blob/feature/async2-exp...

Unlike these folks from dotnet, which tested directly on ASP for real workload

  https://github.com/dotnet/runtimelab/issues/2398?darkschemeovr=1

[1] https://github.com/dotnet/runtimelab/issues/2398

The only way to avoid it is to not build on top of Java or not adding any features on top of Java.

> To give another example with C#, there has been a lot of recent discussion about finding potential alternatives to their async-await concurrency model. They cite the level of effort it takes to maintain the async await style code and the costs that come from this.

I had a very different take-away. They did PoC with virtual threads and decided it's not worth the switch now and async-await that they have is good enough.

https://github.com/dotnet/runtimelab/issues/2398

> Some of the languages it gets compared too aren't even that old yet.

C# is old enough to drink and Scala just had its 20th birthday this week :)

It was tried and the dotnet team decided to drop it: https://github.com/dotnet/runtimelab/issues/2398

Technical details here: https://github.com/dotnet/runtimelab/blob/feature/green-thre...

Just last month .NET ended a green threading experiment, mainly because the overhead it adds to FFI was too high:

https://github.com/dotnet/runtimelab/issues/2398

Rust had green threads until late 2014, and they were removed because of their impact on performance.

Everyone has done the basic research: green threading is a convenient abstraction that comes with certain performance trade offs. It doesn't work for the kind of profile that Rust is trying to target.