[mat-dev] Upgrade Eclipse MAT to Java 8?

[Jason Koch <jkoch@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all

I'm proposing an upgrade of Eclipse MAT to Java 8 to support some performance work, and would like your/community feedback.

I am a little unclear of the expectations of the community around the use of Java 8. MAT currently is based on Photon which requires Java 8. However, the contributing setup page refers to Java 5 explicitly, and the code does not seem to use any newer Java features.

https://wiki.eclipse.org/MemoryAnalyzer/Contributor_Reference#Setup

Java 8 has some niceties that make parallel work easier (eg Arrays.parallelSort), and I believe a good chunk of the MAT code could take advantage of this.

For background - I am working on making enhancements to MAT to improve performance for use cases with large heaps (30-100GB) and many-core environments. I'm starting with what I believe are relatively non-invasive changes (no API change, no architecture changes). Being able to confidently use 8x features would make this job a lot simpler.

Thanks

Jason