When they say "into the current javac and dx set of tools" what are they meaning there? How will they do that exactly? I thought the whole rationale for Jack was it was a clean break from Sun / Oracle Java and entirely open source.
Presumably they could have the dx tool in the current toolchain support Java 8 bytecode .class files as input (just as the Jill linker in Jack toolchain allows).
>I thought the whole rationale for Jack was it was a clean break from Sun / Oracle Java and entirely open source.
In the current toolchain you do something like the following: java sources -> javac -> .class files -> dx tool -> dex file -> ...
(We already have an open javac with OpenJDK by the way, and dx is part of AOSP, so "entirely open source" was essentially solved).
Part of the idea behind Jack was that by creating a new compiler toolchain specifically for Android you could have a faster build by jettisoning the unnecessary .class intermediates and going straight to dex from the sources (or rather, as it turns out, a pre-dex that goes into a new intermediate .jack file with other metadata).