It’s just short for “Java environment manager”. Additionally, any Java libraries that touch hardware (I’m looking at you JavaFX, which can use hardware acceleration), would need their own port as well.Īnd so it stands to reason that we need to pay alot of close attention to any Java installations, and we can expect a bunch of issues to pop up if we try to blindly recreate an Intel-based Macbook Java environment within our new M1. These are breaking and significant changes which occurred in the span of just a single generation – the entire JDK had to be ported very quickly for compatibility. Its architecture differs drastically from the old Intel-based Macbooks. It has both a CPU and GPU on the same block. It’s their first RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing – and no pun intended). The M1 itself is an ARM-based SoC (System on a Chip). We also have several third-party open-source tools that rely on Java as well, most importantly for our various login integrations (Okta->DUO->AWS, OneLogin->WebApp, etc) that we need to be able to do just about anything for our jobs.Īnd so with this mix of a fresh M1, our required tooling, their dependencies, and our local development environment, the fun truly begins. This means we have to hunt and gather open-source Java to run our platform upon both locally and in the cloud.

However, we do not run a paid/licensed Oracle JDK. No knock on that – it’s great hardware and it is extremely power efficient, requiring no fans whatsoever (finally, silence).

I’m a senior engineer on the Java team, and it goes without saying that all my teammates need to quickly and reliably get a modern JVM running on their systems.Īll new hires are given M1 Macbook Pros. Recently I’ve been tasked with onboarding new hires for my current company.

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