Microsoft completes phase one of porting OpenJDK for Windows 10 on ARM devices

June 24, 2020

Microsoft’s Java Engineering Group has completed the first phase of porting OpenJDK for Windows 10 on Arm-based devices. While its port is not yet feature- complete, it is usable by developers who want to start developing in Java on Windows 10 ARM-64 laptops like the Microsoft Surface Pro X, officials said on June 24.

Microsoft bought jClarity last year with the stated intent of using its technology to optimize Java workloads on Azure. London-based jClarity promotes its commercial support for AdoptOpenJDK binaries as being “the drop-in replacement for Oracle’s Java/JDK.” Microsoft has been a sponsor of the AdoptOpenJDK project since 2018.

Microsoft officials said its jClarity purchase kicked off the official formation of the Java Engineering Group in Microsoft’s Developer Division.

This new OpenJDK port is based on the OpenJDK tip branch (16+), according to Microsoft’s post and can run most workloads, including SPEC SERT after Microsoft’s contributions towards the new platform combination are accepted, as well as all of the SPEC Java suites.

“While optimizing Java for Azure remains one of our core goals, it is crucial to share that we are involved in other initiatives to make the Java platform even better on areas besides the Cloud,” said Bruno Borges, Principal Program Manager of the Java Engineering Group, in today’s blog post.

He included the slide above from Microsoft’s Build 2020 event showing some of the areas where Microsoft is investing in Java in LinkedIn, SQL Server, Yammer, Minecraft and Azure. Azure offerings a number of services dependent on Java including Azure HDInsight, Databricks, Synapse and the Azure Spring Cloud. Microsoft also has been working with Arm on servers, too, through its Open Compute Project efforts.

Microsoft also has more than 1,000 developers who are building native or Xamarin apps for Android, and these developers still need Java on their development environments and their continuous integration/continuous delivery pipelines.

Article source: https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-completes-phase-one-of-porting-openjdk-for-windows-10-on-arm-devices/#ftag=RSSbaffb68