John Rose of Oracle:
Panama is not just about C headers. It is about building a framework in which any data+function schema of APIs can be efficiently plugged into the JVM. So it's not just C or C++ but protocol specs and persistent memory structures and on-disk formats and stuff not invented yet. We've been relentless about designing the framework down to essential functionality (memory access and procedure calls), not just our (second-)favorite language or compiler.
The important deliverable of Panama is therefore not Posix bindings, but rather a language-neutral memory layout-and-access mechanism, plus a language-neutral (initially ABI-compliant) subroutine invocation mechanism. The jextract tool grovels over ANSI C (soon C++) schemas and translates to the layouts and function calls, bound helpfully to Java APIs with unsurprising names. But the jextract tool is just the first plugin of many.
We do look forward to building more plugins for more metadata formats outside the Java ecosystem, such as what you are building.
In fact, I expect that, in the long run, we will not build all of the plugins, but that people who invent new data schemas (or even data+function schemas or languages) will consider using our tools (layouts, binder, metadata annotations) to integrate with Java, instead of the standard technique, which is to write a set of Java native functions from scratch, or (if you are very clever) with tooling. The binder pattern, in particular, seems to be a great way to spin repetitive code for accessing data structures of all sorts, not just C or Java. I hope it will be used, eventually, in preference to static protocol compilers. The JVM is very good at on-line optimization, even of freshly spun code, so it is a natural framework for building a binder.
>They aren't doing it the way they should be in order to properly target native vectorized code.
Which is interesting since Intel is the one contributing the majority of the vector code changes.
