Hey everyone,
Awhile back, there was a question on the Mechanical Sympathy mailing list (if you haven't heard of it before, it's a group for discussing development of high-performance programs, mainly focussing on Java).
Gil Tene (CTO and Co-Founder of Azul Systems) provided a critical comparison of Azul's build of OpenJDK (Zulu) as compared to the package currently in Debian.
Quoting from his post:
To my knowledge, Zulu is currently the only OpenJDK 8 binary build available that is actually fully tested. When I say "actually fully tested", I mean that someone actually states that the specific binary package has passed the full set of OpenJDK TCK tests, and is verified to be a compatible and complaint implementation of the Java SE 8 spec. Azul certifies this for each Zulu binary package.
So for Java 8 (right now) your choices are OpenJDK (via the Zulu binary distros) or Oracle JDK. Both are well tested, compatibility-verified JDK 8 binaries. And both are available for Linux, Windows, and MacOS.
And no, that thing called "openjdk-8-jdk" that you would unfortunately get when you do an apt-get from the experimental or sid debian repos is not a good OpenJDK build. It currently appears shows as 8u40, which is something that doesn't actually exist yet. OpenJDK 8u40 is schedule to come out in March, and anything called "8u40" right now (without clear early access indicators) is certainly not a good release of anything.
I wonder if there's anything that can (or should) be done to address Gil's criticisms. I love Debian and would always prefer to install things via apt-get from the official repositories rather than download/install third-party packages, so it would be nice to address these issues.
Cheers,
Jonathan