Posted by gouessej on Dec 02, 2023; 4:10pm
URL: https://forum.jogamp.org/32-bit-Windows-natives-tp4043189p4043193.html

A single "executable JAR" is a poor option, it has many limitations (you can use only options supported in the manifest or you have to provide a platform-dependent script to run the JAR, the JRE must be installed on the system, there must be no conflict with another software able to open a JAR including archivers, etc) and you can use modules with jpackage and jlink to bundle a minimized JRE. By the way, Adoptium already provides JREs whose size is around 150 MB and that includes Swing support.

I remind you that OpenJDK is the reference implementation of Java since its version 7. In other terms, when Java 32-bit support dies, it will die for both OpenJDK and Oracle Java. Rather complain to Oracle if it still suggests to download 32-bit JREs for hardware supporting 64-bit JREs.

Running a 32-bit variant on a 64-bit operating system is useless as long as you can specify options for the virtual machine to use less memory so that it continues to work on machines with a little RAM.

Time has changed, only a few end users accept installing a JRE, some of them don't update the JREs, relying on the JRE installed on the system is not a viable option on the long term. It was viable but problematic 20 years ago. Imagine that an end user installed  Java 8 but you need to use some APIs and/or to benefit of bug fixes available only in Java 11, you'll have to rewrite your source code not to fall into this situation. Maybe you're not even aware of such bugs, one of them affects the stream API appeared in Java 8.

I hardly see how to use Java >= 9 with JOGL without passing VM arguments and by providing a single fat JAR for all operating systems. When a GNU Linux user downloads a package for its distribution or when an OS X user downloads an .app file, as they are more familiar with that, it produces less friction than providing a JAR generally. Providing programs written in Java in 2023 to the public is already difficult when lots of them are accustomed with stores and online programs with no install, we won't convince them if we don't make things easy for them and a single fat JAR for everybody is not a reliable solution. If it worked reliably, yes, it would be awesome.