Ceylon on Java 9 + Jigsaw

Gavin KingDecember 21st, 2015Last Updated: December 21st, 2015

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Everyone is talking about modules these days. New languages try to incorporate them, and older languages try to retrofit them in. Which is great news, because modules are essential. Java 9 is around the corner, because it’s supposed to come out next year, and the really big new feature is modularity, which it calls the Jigsaw project.

Ceylon is a language that featured modularity from the start, as part of the language and not as an afterthought requiring complex third-party tool integration. In fact, at the time we designed our Java JDK integration (at the time of Java 7), we went as far as using the Jigsaw modularity plans for the JDK (yes Jigsaw got delayed a few times) from the start, requiring JDK users to import Jigsaw modules as they were planned at the time, rather than import the whole JDK in one go. So perhaps we were the first ones with a modular JDK, in some sense :)

Java 9’s Jigsaw

Jigsaw is a very large project, which includes the following changes:

Modularisation of the JDK into smaller units, such as java.base, java.xml that Ceylon users of the JDK are already familiar with.
This modularisation means removal of rt.jar that contained every JDK class. In fact it’s been replaced by a bootmodules.jimage file which is not a jar, but whose contents can be accessed by a virtual NIO FileSystem at jrt:/.
You can write your own modules. To turn your Java code into a Java 9 module, you simply add a module descriptor in a file called module-info.java (much like Ceylon module descriptors, or Java package descriptors), which describes your module and the Java 9 compiler and jar tools will then generate a jar with a module-info.class descriptor at the root of the jar.
That module descriptor allows you to specify the module name, the packages it exports, the name of the modules it imports and a few other things. But not versions, unfortunately, which are currently “out of scope” in Java 9.
You can run your code as previously from the classpath, or as modules from the module path. The module path is just a folder in which you can place your modules and the JRE will look them up for you based on module name alone.

Ceylon and Jigsaw

Java 9 has two early-access (EA) downloads for users to try the module system. Only one of them includes user modules. Make sure you use that one if you want to try out Ceylon running on Java 9.

Over the past weeks I’ve worked on getting Ceylon compiling and running on Java 9. This involved (among other details) the following things:

Generating module-info.class files from Ceylon module descriptors.
Generating module-info.class files for the Ceylon distribution modules which are not written in Ceylon (like the compilers or runtime system).
Making use of the Java 9 module descriptors for the shared packages information it contains (something supported by Ceylon since the beginning, but which was lacking for plain Java jars).
Backporting Java 9 code that deals with modules to the javac fork we use to compile Java files and generate bytecode.
Dealing with the removal of rt.jar and the boot classpath.
Creating a new tool ceylon jigsaw which allows for the creation of a Java 9 module path.
Making sure we can run Ceylon modules as Java 9 modules as an alternative to the four existing JVM runtimes which are the JBoss Modules, classpath, OSGi or Java EE.
Make sure we can build and run on any of Java 7,8,9. This means that by default we do not generate Java 9 module descriptors, because several tools have problems dealing with them at this time.
We have split some things out of the ceylon.language module so that it no longer depends on the compilers and type-checker, which means a lighter minimal runtime, which will be even further improved in the next weeks with more dependency removals :)

Just tell me how to try this!

I will spare you the many details of this work, but with help from the Java 9 team, this is how you can run your Ceylon modules on a Java 9 runtime:

Download the Java 9 EA with Jigsaw.
Get the Ceylon distribution code, and compile it with ant -Djigsaw=true clean dist to get the Java 9 module descriptors.
Write your Ceylon module normally, but compile it with .../ceylon/dist/dist/bin/ceylon compile --generate-module-info to generate the Java 9 module descriptors.
Create your Java 9 module path in an mlib folder with .../ceylon/dist/dist/bin/ceylon jigsaw create-mlib my.module/1.
Run your Ceylon module on Java 9 with .../jdk1.9.0-jigsaw/bin/java -mp mlib -m ceylon.language my.module/1. At the moment, the ceylon.language module acts as main module and does the required setting up of the Ceylon runtime before loading and invoking your Ceylon module.

That’s all there is to it!

Caveats

Java 9 is not complete yet, and our support for Java 9 is also not complete. There will be issues and bugs, and in fact we already know of several limitations, such as the following:

While you can import a pure Java 9 module from Ceylon, we will respect its exported packages, but we will not respect its dependencies, because Java 9 modules do not include dependency versions. In fact, even the module’s version is not stored in the source module descriptor, but added by an optional flag to the Java 9 jar tool. Ceylon requires module dependencies to describe a version, so we have to combine the Java 9 module descriptor with another descriptor such as an OSGi descriptor or a Maven pom.xml descriptor. This merging of information is not currently done.
Java 9 does not currently support optional modules or module cycles. It is not clear if they will support them at this time, unfortunately.
The ceylon import-jar tool may complain about module visibility artifacts. We intend to fix this in time, but for now you can use --force.
The JDK module list we used in Ceylon has slightly changed in Java 9. This is what we get for being the first to support Jigsaw ;) For example, the javax.xml module has been renamed to java.xml. We have set up aliases so that it “just” works, but there are modules that have been merged, and packages that have changed module, so it will not always work.
The Java 9 runtime has been tested, but not as thoroughly as the existing JBoss Modules, classpath, OSGi or Java EE runtimes. We expect a few issues in the Ceylon metamodel.