Re: Status of the GJC

[Mark Wielaard <mark@klomp.org>]

On Tue, 2010-10-26 at 10:30 +0100, Andrew Haley wrote:
> On 10/26/2010 10:26 AM, Mark Wielaard wrote:
> > On Mon, 2010-10-25 at 17:56 -0400, Harpal Grover wrote:
> >>> It's mostly in maintenance mode.  The compiler itself is pretty solid, but
> >>> the Classpath runtime library isn't being developed very much.  We really
> >>> need to port gcj to use the OpenJDK runtime libraries, which would make
> >>> gcj an excellent product, but so far no-one has had the time to do it.
> >>
> >> I think that's an excellent idea.
> >>
> >> How does one start helping out with that?
> > 
> > There was a project to create a Common Virtual Machine Interface which
> > has some interesting pointers. And Andrew Hughes made enough progress on
> > it to get JamVM to work against it. This project is currently not very
> > active, but seems a good starting point:
> > http://icedtea.classpath.org/wiki/CVMIDiscussion
> > http://fuseyism.com/openjdk/cvmi/
> 
> Hmm.  I would have thought it made more sense to get gcj working with
> the Sun JDK VM interface.  I think we would have done it that way to
> begin with, but the JDK VM interface was secret.

The CVMI pages point to descriptions of the current VM interfaces of
both GNU Classpath (which gcj largely implements) and how Hotspot
interfaces with the OpenJDK class library. It also has a pointer to what
Cacao does (which implements both, plus the CLDC/PhoneME interface). So
even if you don't want to reuse any code from the project itself, it
seems a good starting point if you want to figure out what needs to be
done/changed.

Cheers,

Mark