JNA VS skija

As far as I understand it, with JNA, all calls into C code go through libffi: https://github.com/java-native-access/jna/blob/master/www/Fu...

This means that every call sets up some libffi data structures and libffi uses this information to perform the native call. Likewise in the other direction for return values. With JNI (and Panama), Hotspot can directly emit the argument/return code a the call, not too dissimilar from what a C or C++ compiler would do. There is still some overhead from maintaining JVM invariants. For example, I think a thread blocked in an FFI call can still participate in a safepoint. But that applies to JNI as well.

If you were prepared to go to the JVM you might try JNA. https://github.com/java-native-access/jna

Other good example, but for Java platform is JNA library. Do not mix it with Java's JNI, which is a bad example of how it could be done.

In case you haven't used it (assuming that you already know about JNI, for comparison) - https://github.com/java-native-access/jna is about as easy as it gets for native interop. Also, as mentioned in another comment, with the Java FFM (Foreign Function and Memory) API already in preview mode, pretty soon, there will be no external dependencies at all, and Java should be able to interop with any language that can talk to C.

The complexity of JNI has given rise to some community-driven libraries that make it simpler to do FFI in Java. Java Native Access (JNA) is one of them. It's built on top of JNI and at least makes FFI easier to use, especially as it removes the need to write any C binding code manually and reduces the chances of memory safety issues. Still, it has some of the disadvantages of being JNI-based and is slightly slower than JNI in many cases. However, JNA is widely used and battle-tested, so definitely a better option than using JNI directly.

This is about calling into any native operating system APIs, as long as they are callable via C or C++ (which these days means "all" operating system APIs).

JNI is somewhat harder to use, because you need custom glue on both sides of the border: Some custom classes in Java and some custom code on the C (and C++) side.

This proposal would remove the need for the glue on the C side and would allow a pure java solution.

Something like this has existed in third-party form for a while as JNA (https://github.com/java-native-access/jna), but now it's going to be built into the JRE itself (if the proposal passes through review)

I use JNA https://github.com/java-native-access/jna , as you can write the entire interface in Java faster as well as easier without the need of messing with the complexities of JNI.

I think IntelliJ was built on Swing and predates JavaFX… however, I’m curious if they’ve got plans to integrate their Skia integration work that backs desktop compose: https://github.com/JetBrains/skija

Maybe the story is not finished yet. New approaches like JetBrain's Compose (https://www.jetbrains.com/de-de/lp/compose-mpp/) with a React inspired programming model might bring some new interest to the platform. Then there is a Java binding library for Skia (https://github.com/JetBrains/skija), and JavaFX is also alive and high quality.

As everyone is used to fat Electron apps now, Java applications (especially compiled and packed with new JDK features) might be refreshing.

I think it's the core, the 2D engine, just never got the love it needed to be a great place to start. Nobody seemed to prioritize making that happen.

Like, the antialiasing was noticably fuzzy. I never found an applet that looked like it belonged on the webpage. And when I built a few, it was a lot of work to even get font rendering to not be horrendous. And even then, you'd see what the browser rendered vs what the applet rendered and they were always off. I remember using images instead of font rendering sometimes.

So, if you made a swing app, it was easy to put together, but hard to make look "professional".

By the time of the Oracle acquisition, I'm pretty sure everyone just realized "the browser won" and that's why we just had JavaFX get broken off the platform and basically put out to pasture. But it's not like much went into the core platform itself to make building great UIs easy. The underlying 2D rendering just never worked efficiently.

I mean, even today, there's some serious performance issues with IntelliJ on 4k monitors with scaling. https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JBR-526

When I look at where JetBrains is going, it sure seems like they are building on top of a better 2D engine, in this case, skia: https://github.com/JetBrains/skija.

Under the covers it uses Skija which is a java wrapper for Skia which is a C++ 2D graphics engine (https://github.com/JetBrains/skija)

You can take a look at Skija from Jetbrains. It's a wrapper around the Skia library used by Chrome, Xamarin, LibreOffice, among others.

Technically, the bot is written in Kotlin using Ktor and Koin. It's a single endpoint web service, listening for Telegram Bot API webhooks. Text is drawn using Oswald font (I need Cyrillic, not supported in Anton) with Skija library, a Java wrapper for Skia, a 2D library powering your phone and browser. It is really cool and next time you need to make something with graphics, consider using Skia and its wrapper for your language. Next, generated images are upload to Imgur via its API (the documentation could be better). The whole thing is running on a free VM in Oracle Cloud. So, yeah, next time you need to host something lightweight — check out their offering. Oracle also provides a free DB instance, which I'm using to cache the links. Monitoring: Grafana Cloud (also free). Deployments: GitHub Actions + Ansible. So it didn't cost me a penny, except for ~50 hours of coding in two weeks on the evenings.