Project Panama: Interconnecting JVM and native code

We are improving and enriching the connections between the Java virtual machine and well-defined but “foreign” (non-Java) APIs, including many interfaces commonly used by C programmers.

To this end, Project Panama will include most or all of these components:

• native function calling from JVM
• native data access from JVM or inside JVM heap
• new data layouts in JVM heap
• native metadata definition for JVM
• header file API extraction tools (jextract)
• native library management APIs
• native-oriented interpreter and runtime “hooks”
• class and method resolution “hooks”
• native-oriented JIT optimizations
• tooling or wrapper interposition for safety
• exploratory work with difficult-to-integrate native libraries

Community

This Project is sponsored by the Hotspot Group.

• Mailing lists & News
  • panama-dev — Foreign Function & Memory API, Vector API
  • jextract-dev — jextract tool
  • Stay tuned on latest Panama development at Inside.java
• Design documents
  • Panama foreign memory acccess
  • Panama foreign function support
  • Panama jextract usage examples
  • early problem space overview: the isthmus in the VM
• JEPs
  • Foreign Function & Memory API: JEP-424
  • Vector API: JEP-426
• Talks
  • Project Panama: say goodbye to JNI!
  • The Vector API in JDK 17
  • ByteBuffers are dead, long live ByteBuffers!
  • Deconstructing Panama
  • Vector API
  • Panama: a foreign policy for Java

Repository organization

Project Panama is designed to incubate a series of components for eventual inclusion in the JDK, via curated merge. Project Panama features are being actively developed in the following repositories:

• Panama foreign support, which adds support for foreign memory access, as well as for foreign function calls;
• Panama vector support, which adds vectorization support in Java through JVM intriniscs; and
• jextract, a tool which mechanically generate Java bindings from native library headers.

The legacy Panama repository is also available here, although we do not expect to carry out further work there; as such this repository should not be used (and in the future we might make this more explicit by marking the legacy repository as read-only).