Re: Roadmap Question for GWT 3.0

On Monday, October 19, 2015 at 12:22:19 PM UTC+2, Jens wrote:

* Stick with 2.x and risk being left behind and the project becoming neglected due to split effort.

You are not behind when using 2.x:

GWT 2 = GWT 2.x Compiler + JsInterop + Elemental 1 + Elemental 2 when released + all current GWT SDK code + all GWT libraries.

GWT 3 = J2CL + JsInterop + Elemental 2 + anything from GWT SDK and other GWT libraries that is compatible with J2CL

So not such a difference right? In fact with GWT 3 you currently get less than with GWT 2.x because you can not use all library code available. However everything that works with GWT 3 should automatically also work with GWT 2.

I don't think "JSNI 2" (the one without the 'native' keyword and special comment syntax) will be backported to GWT 2.x, and evolutions to JsInterop are likely to be GWT 3+ only too.

I think what salk31 meant is that in one or 2 years from now, GWT 2.x might really be "behind", depending on who puts the efforts in supporting GWT 2.x. Who knows if existing library code won't break in newer versions of evergreen browsers? (just like History.newItem in GWT <=2.6 breaks in Firefox 41+ because Firefox finally aligned its behavior on the "consensus" specified in "HTML the living standard"; more generally, all permutation-specific code might break in the future as browsers converge to an interoperable behavior, so GWT 2.x will have to be actively maintained). And as GWT 3.x and 2.x will start diverging (JSNI 2, JsInterop 2; Java 9 ?), libraries will start to become incompatible with GWT 2.x.

So I really think that this is a legitimate concern, and that nobody has the answer yet. The only thing we're sure is that Google will push internally to moving to j2cl; we just don't know how they'll do it (rewrite parts of the apps that aren't compatible with j2cl, or start bringing to GWT 3.x the libs that they internally need, possibly not in a fully backwards-compatible way though, as they have the tooling to refactor all their codebase at once: kythe, refaster, etc.)

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