LWGJL 3.0.0 Released

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LWJGL (Light Weight Java Game Library), a set of Java bindings for several low level libraries ( Open GL, ES, Vulkan, OpenCL, GLFW, etc. ) just released version 3.0.0 after 3 years in development.  This is the underlying technology used by LibGDX for desktop support for example.  This release brings several changes, including:

BINDINGS

  • Added support for Java array parameters and HotSpot Critical Natives. (#175)
  • Added Vulkanl bindings. (#50)
  • Added NanoVG bindings. (#99)
  • Added NativeFileDialog bindings.
  • Added par_shapes.h bindings.
  • Added dyncall bindings.
  • Added jawt bindings for AWT/Swing integration. (#125)
  • Added simple OS-specific window creation bindings, for custom window/context creation. (#105)
  • Added missing OpenCL and OpenAL extensions.
  • Fully documented OpenCL and OpenAL.
  • Moved WGL and GLX capabilities to the new WGLCapabilities and GLXCapabilities classes, respectively. Functionality in WGL, GLX and corresponding extensions that does not require a current context can now be used without creating a dummy context first. (#171)

IMPROVEMENTS

  • Added stack allocation APIs (the MemoryStack class and new allocation methods in struct classes and MemoryUtil).
  • Made the implementations of PointerBuffer and Struct/StructBuffer subclasses as lightweight as possible. This makes it easier for escape analysis to eliminate allocations.
  • Minor struct API improvements.
  • Added nullability information to struct members, to protect against buggy code crashing the JVM.
  • All bindings are updated to the latest versions of the corresponding libraries. Notably, GLFW now hasglfwSetWindowIcon and glfwSetWindowMonitor, it now doesn’t lack anything compared to LWJGL 2’s Display.
  • Refactored callbacks for Java 8. (#182)
  • Added NativeResource interface and made freeable objects usable as resources in try-with-resources statements. (#186)
  • Faster thread-local lookups for the stack and current capabilities. New options in Configuration can be used tocomplete eliminate thread-local lookup in OpenGL, OpenGL ES and OpenAL, when it is known that only a single context will be used, or that all contexts will be compatible (same capabilities and same function pointers).
  • Added memSlice for all buffers types in MemoryUtil. (#179)
  • Refactored the Configuration class for type safety and added more options.
  • JDK 9 can now be used to build and run LWJGL.
  • Javadoc is now generated with JDK 9. The API is fully indexed and search functionality is available. Also made multiple Javadoc formatting improvements.
  • Improved debug diagnostics on startup and when loading the LWJGL shared library fails.
  • Optimized memSet and memCopy for small buffers.

FIXES

  • Stopped using UPX compression for binaries. This eliminates various integration issues and virus scanning false-positives.
  • The SharedLibraryLoader now works with any shared library, not only libraries LWJGL knows about. (#176)

BREAKING CHANGES

  • LWJGL now requires Java 8 to build and run. Certain custom interfaces have been replaced with java.util.functioninterfaces. (#177)
  • Dropped support for Linux x86. (#162)
  • Dropped libffi bindings.
  • Dropped ALDevice/ALContext wrappers from OpenAL and CLPlatform/CLDevice wrappers from OpenCL. (#152)
  • Dropped the getInstance() method from bindings loaded from shared libraries. Function pointers are now stored either in capabilities classes or in a nested Functions inner class.
  • Dropped infrequently used method overloads in bindings. Full javadoc is now generated on (almost) all overloads.
  • Dropped utility classes that were not useful.
  • Added AutoSize support to struct members. Instance setters for the corresponding count/size members were removed to avoid bugs and confusion.
  • Replaced MemoryUtil.memFree(StructBuffer) with StructBuffer.free().
  • Renamed __ALIGNMENT to ALIGNOF in struct classes.
  • Removed org.lwjgl.system.Retainable interface. Closure and FunctionProvider subclasses are now destroyed using.free() instead of .release().
  • Moved xxHash and SSE bindings to the org.lwjgl.util package.
  • Integer-boolean native types (0 or 1 are the only legal values) are now mapped to Java booleans. (#181)
  • Macros without parameters are now generated as static final values, not methods.

You can read more about the release here.

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