Back in high school days, I learned how Java programs could work flawlessly across different machines without the need for any additional compilation - Write once, run anywhere. One of our laptops had a 64-bit Ubuntu installed while the other one had a 32-bit Windows 7. I tested out on a few more platforms and realized one particular hurdle that constantly popped up: It was necessary to have Java installed beforehand, which most OSs didn't ship by default. So here's a post about how you could make your apps truly standalone.

Let me show how you can use GraalVM to create an OpenGL app in Java. This is made possible by the native-image tool that helps GraalVM produce truly native binaries capable of interacting with native libraries directly, without any JNI overhead. ⚡️

We all expect a bunch of new stories, resolutions, and ideas popping up at the start of each year. But 2020 wasn't supposed to be just another year, it's a new decade. So it's natural to expect that the usual new year excitement would be amped up all round the world. Alas, things turned out in an exactly opposite way, isn't it?

Finally, we're at the end! This last week of GSoC includes implementation of parts of the revised Package Manager model, namely the PackageDatabase and some methods for interacting with our Jenkins repository.

The penultimate week of GSoC was filled with architectural designs and discussions. I've spent a good amount of time researching on apt, pacman and npm, and along with the lessons learned from the previous Package Manager implementation, we're planning out an improved design for making the Package Manager more extensible and robust.

Alright! The last month is half done, and this week brings some more updates to the Package Manager. The integration is ready to be tested and is almost working just the way it used to, along with the invisible Package Manager underneath. Though it only supports storing and loading of cache now, future PRs should bring full powers to it: installation, uninstallation, etc.

So the first week of our third phase, finally came to an end. Almost the entire week was dedicated to the package manager, and it's still far from being complete. But the launcher no longer crashes or freezes while starting up with it, and that's a relieving thing to see.

This was quite a terrible week for me. I had to be inactive because of some serious, untimely issues. I also had to shift to my college's city, as classes were about to restart. So there's no contribution to show in this update. I'll try to make up for the lost time in the upcoming week and take care of the package manager.