J2CL Now & Next

[gkdn]

By popular request, I am listing the things that J2CL team is actively working on apart from continuous improvements and maintenance and what to expect in the next quarters:

Last Edit: Dec 3, 2024

Now

• Support for Java 21
• Switch default fronted from JDT to Javac
• Open-source tooling to enable Kotlin support

Next

• Implement TestSuite support for Open Source
• Reduce limitations on @JsEnums
• Finalize supported Enum/EnumSet APIs
• Add periodic auto-tagging for Open Source for versioned releases

Later

• Enable RTA pruning for Open Source development
• Investigate embedding GwtIncompatibleStripper step into J2CL
• Add ability to run JsInteropRestrictionChecker as an ErrorProne plugin
• Optimize Dagger to be more efficient with J2CL
• Remove boxing from long (similar to double/Double)

Completed in previous quarters

• Modular compilation for Wasm
• Improve Wasm GC spec, tooling and J2CL experimental Wasm backend
• Implement testing support for Open Source
• Java 11 support (completed, waiting Bazel release)
• First-class support for JSR nullability
• Optimize AutoValue to be more efficient with J2CL
• Improve code generation Java enums to reduce code size
• Add experimental Wasm backend
• Switch to Bazel TreeArtifacts
• Overhaul bridge calculate&creation to fix related bugs and reduce code size
• Fix overflow for integer arithmetic
• Improve JsCompiler optimizations
• Switch to Bazelisk by default

Note:

The J2CL code is production ready and battle tested with Google Apps for years. Only open-source tooling is missing some workflows. All of our improvements to the released code are in sync with Google and you are getting the improvement at the same time as Google gets.

At the moment for J2CL, we are only planning to do dated releases (instead of semantic versioning like v1) and make more tools work in open source over time.

[rov63rus]

Are you planning gradle support ? Bazel is not known to any IDE.

[tbroyer]

https://docs.bazel.build/versions/master/ide.html ?
(my main problem with the IntelliJ IDEA plugin though is that it's currently not compatible with latest IDEA 2020.2: bazelbuild/intellij#1998)

[sgammon]

i would love to see some gRPC support on this list :)

[treblereel]

Are there any workarounds how to run tests, before j2cl_test ll be ported ? It's a critical feature

[rjahn]

any updates here?

[gkdn]

I update it every now and then but comment date doesn't reflect that (you need to click edited to see the change dates).

[LifeIsStrange]

Any update on Kotlin support? That would be amazing and java projects are increasingly hybridized with Kotlin

[gkdn]

We just started Kotlin work. Our goal is to have something usable by end of the year.

[LifeIsStrange]

@gkdn that is amazing to hear but Kotlin JS is officially developed and has an excellent and mature support for transpiling Kotlin to JS (and generating typescript types)
However while kotlin multiplarform/js is great, and while j2cl allow to transpile Java to js, I feel like the main area for improvement would be for J2CL to leverage existing Kotlin js transpiling ability and to be interoperable with the generated js from Java.
If you could work on making it easier to have hybrid Kotlin-Java projects that target js that would be amazing, maybe that the biggest issue is about IDE supports at the boundaries (Kotlin js will not allow calling java code even if this java code transpile to J2CL). Improving this IDE interop between Java and Kotlin JS should be possible in theory, either by contributing directly to the Kotlin js compiler or by making a Kotlin compiler plugin (note that the replacement API for the new Kotlin compiler (K2) is in active development https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/KT-49508
)
Also you might consider using arrow-meta which is a library that helps building compiler plugins.
https://github.com/arrow-kt/arrow-meta
BTW since you work at Google, maybe you could contact one of the official Google kotlin devs, as you can see here: https://kotlinlang.org/docs/kotlin-foundation.html#current-personnel
for some guidance.
The best would be to contact Roman Elizarov or to open a youtrack ticket for a collaboration :)
I really hope there is the possibility of making a synergy with JetBrains!
Anyway just my two cents on how to achieve the best of both worlds.

BTW: I concur that Gradle support would be a step in the right direction for adoption.

[gkdn]

Our high demanding customers relies on very Closure style centric Google JavaScript stack (which J2CL is optimized for) and they count every single byte for performance. Unfortunately Kotlin/JS output doesn't match our needs and sometimes in a way that might be contradicting with the Kotlin open-source users needs who rely on different JavaScript stacks.

So for now our main focus we will be enabling Kotlin to those customers. Being said that I already met with Roman on this and we are in contact with JetBreains. We will be still looking into bringing the two worlds together in the long run.

[LifeIsStrange]

@gkdn I suppose you could apply a post processing step to the generated kotlin-js by feeding it to Closure. You could also work on improving the efficiency of the IR backend.
But sure feel free to implement your own incompatible transpiler.