IKVM is alive & well
We along with many others read with sadness when Jeroen Frijters announced the end of his work on IKVM. What he created is a thing of beauty that we and a lot of others depended on.
Because we use IKVM to build the .NET version of our engine, we copied the final IKVM and created a new project that we are supporting going forward. You can find the projects here:
We also have both in NuGet so you can easily add them as references to your projects.
Going forward, what are our plans? First off, we’re unlikely to do anything more on 7.5.0.2, unless there’s a serious need. The future is 8.5.0.2.
On the Java side we’re limited to Java 8 for some time because we create libraries others use and many of our customers are staying on Java 8 for the indefinite future. Oracle has promised to continue support for it indefinitely and we have to match the oldest version in common use.Therefore, our efforts on IKVM are likely to be against Java 8 for the near future.
If others want to branch this to an IKVM 9, we’ll support any work they do. And we of course welcome any improvements to IKVM 8. We will fix any issues found in IKVM 8, but to date there has been 1 performance problem(so slow it appeared locked up). The existing product is complete and rock solid.
To date our stats on downloads from NuGet are small-ish. But use of it is growing. So we’re slowly building up a community of users. And slow is understandable as Jeroen’s final build of IKVM 8 was rock solid. There will be companies continuing to use it 10 years from now without a problem or limitation. The community of IKVM users is gigantic.
As to those worried that IKVM will go away – the need is too great in the immediate future for that to be a concern. If we hadn’t moved forward with this, someone else certainly would have.
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