Drop support for windows

[normanmaurer]

I propose to drop support for windows and just focus on linux / macOS. Users of windows can just use the JDK implementation for SSL

[normanmaurer]

/cc @vietj @slandelle @trustin @chrisvest @ejona86 @franz1981

[franz1981]

I am not aware of anything bad with it, but let me summon @cescoffier here

[cescoffier]

+1

[normanmaurer]

/cc @violetagg

[slandelle]

I’m fine with it. What’s less work for you.

[violetagg]

+1

[ejona86]

CC @matthewstevenson88 @rmehta19

[ejona86]

CC @kannanjgithub

[vietj]

@normanmaurer I'm fine with that

[chrisvest]

I'm biased, but I'm in favor. We already don't support any native transports for Windows.

[zekronium]

Isin't the windows JDK implementation much worse performance wise than BoringSSL?

[normanmaurer]

@zekronium maybe ? Honestly I don't know ... That said no-one of our core developers has any use-case for windows so I feel we should better invest our energy in things that matter to us :)

[normanmaurer]

@ejona86 so any concerns from the GRPC side or not ?

[trustin]

I'm fine with dropping Windows support, but I'm curious about why. Is it because of complex build and release process?

[zekronium]

Windows seems least complex to build atleast for me. What is windows specific here that requires/required significant amount of maintenance work?

[normanmaurer]

It's more about that if something does not work no-one will be able to fix it...

[zekronium]

Has that happened?

[ejona86]

Since it's been quite a while since I checked, on Linux with a random gRPC throughput benchmark (TransportBenchmark.streamingCallsByteThroughput) running on my relatively old laptop, I see:

Implementation	Performance
JDK 8	~240 MB/s
JDK 11	~360 MB/s
JDK 17	~530 MB/s
JDK 21	~500 MB/s
JDK 8 w/ tcnative	~600 MB/s
JDK 8 w/ Conscrypt	~600 MB/s
JDK 21 w/ tcnative	~590 MB/s

Not intended to be scientific. I didn't check what ciphers were selected. Assuming this to be a "best case" scenario and anything halfway resembling this on Windows, Java 8/11 users would easily notice dropping tcnative. I think in gRPC we'd look at using Conscrypt even when it isn't installed as a security provider.

[zekronium]

What about JDK21 + tcnative @ejona86

[ejona86]

@zekronium, I had assumed it'd be basically the same as JDK8+tcnative. I just ran a test and saw ~590 MB/s. That's essentially the same given the noise in my test. I've updated the table.

[zapek]

tcnative works fine on Windows, I use it for my project. Also it's open source so anyone can fix it, if needed.

I would understand if it was a pain to maintain and it was frequently broken but it doesn't seem to be the case.