Usage of JBoss Marshalling incompatible with native compilation with GraalVM

[jmartisk]

BatchUtil class currently uses a org.jboss.marshalling.cloner.ObjectCloner. Native compilation yields this (the actual log is much longer and less readable, showing just the most important piece here)

Fatal error: com.oracle.graal.pointsto.util.AnalysisError$ParsingError: Error encountered while parsing org.jboss.marshalling.reflect.SerializableField.setShort(java.lang.Object, short) 
(...)
Caused by: com.oracle.svm.hosted.analysis.flow.SVMMethodTypeFlowBuilder$UnsafeOffsetError: Field AnalysisField<SerializableField.fieldOffset accessed: false reads: true written: true> is used as an offset in an unsafe operation, but no value recomputation found.
 Wrapped field: HotSpotResolvedJavaFieldImpl<org.jboss.marshalling.reflect.SerializableField.fieldOffset long:16>

We might need to get rid of JBoss Marshalling, or hack around it somehow, but I'm not yet sure if it's possible.

[jmartisk]

• Switching to plain Java serialization won't help, that's not supported in native images
• I think we can't use @RecomputeFieldValue substitution for the SerializableField.fieldOffset field, because the underlying field (of which we store the offset) changes dynamically

Options:

• Find/implement a different cloning mechanism
• Rework the model classes in a way that they become immutable, and therefore cloning will not be needed; and pass the context needed for starting jobs using new additional objects rather than by mutating job definition objects
• any other ideas? @chengfang WDYT?

[jmartisk]

Hey @stuartwdouglas what would be your suggestion for this please? I suppose we would need to get rid of JBoss Marshalling if we indeed wanted to integrate JBeret into Quarkus?

[stuartwdouglas]

What exactly is this used for? The correct solution will likely depend on the use case.

[jmartisk]

@stuartwdouglas see https://github.com/jberet/jsr352/blob/master/jberet-core/src/main/java/org/jberet/util/BatchUtil.java#L124
It's used as a general mechanism to clone objects (in particular, the Job class that holds a batch job definition)

[radcortez]

Here is a proposal to remove JBoss Marshalling:
6fb5892

This is using MapStruct to generate the clone / copy code for the Job model.

[chengfang]

MapStruct, if used, will be a new dependency for both JBeret and WildFly. Is it already used in any other of our projects? If so how is the experience?

[radcortez]

@gunnarmorling is one of the creators of the project, so he can probably give additional feedback :)

I don't think it is a major problem, since MapStruct is set as provided and is not required at runtime. It is only used to generate the code for map / copy the objects. The annotations are compile only, so in the end you just have a simple interface with the generated implementation.

[maxandersen]

related to #133