JVM: Pants/Nailgun and future JDKs releases (after version 17)

[oleksii-danchuk]

Hi Pants Team/Community,

What is the support plan for latest jdk releases after jdk 17?

Pants analyze takes forever when using jdk version > 17.
⠠ 601.68s Analyzing reusable-apis/...

Nailgun couldn't start due to the Security Manager is gone

Downloaded https://github.com/adoptium/temurin21-binaries/releases/download/jdk-21.0.2%2B13/OpenJDK21U-jdk_x64_linux_hotspot_21.0.2_13.tar.gz
Exception in thread "NGServer(localhost/127.0.0.1, 0)" java.lang.UnsupportedOperationException: The Security Manager is deprecated and will be removed in a future release
        at java.base/java.lang.System.setSecurityManager(System.java:430)
        at com.martiansoftware.nailgun.NGServer.run(NGServer.java:396)
        at java.base/java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:1583)

[benjyw]

Ooof, we should find someone to give the JVM backend a little love

[hopper-signifyd]

How critical is nailgun? We were able to work around issues with nailgun in Java 21 by disabling it in pants.toml: process_execution_local_enable_nailgun = false

[huonw]

Given the deprecation of Nailgun, potentially we should start phasing it out, e.g. do the usual staged process to switch the default of process_execution_local_enable_nailgun to false, and then eventually remove support entirely.

As part of this, we can solicit requests for contributions to the JVM infrastructure to try to find that volunteer who can give the JVM some love.