Re: About gcj present and future

[Andrew Haley <aph@redhat.com>]

On 01/08/2013 05:44 PM, Ernesto wrote:
>> Well, yes.  Good question.  I'd love to restart active development of
>> GCJ, but OpenJDK is free software and is way ahead in terms of
>> features.  GCJ has some advantages, but so far these haven't been enough
>> to persuade people to work on it.  If we don't do something soon it
>> may be too late.
> 
> Could you please elaborate more on "way ahead in terms of features"?
> Which features, for example?

The Classpath library is somewhere between 1.5 and 1.6.

> Must we rely on the Java Class Libraries? Providing a nice set of
> classes (an alternative framework) would be a feasible way to turn gcj
> into a new life? (another UI framework, implementations on top of
> existing native libre/open source, etc) As I told you in my first
> email, I am new on gcj so maybe the things I'm writing on are unreal,
> unfeasible or completely not applicable.

Well, it's a huge job.  A better idea IMO would be to fix gcj to use
the OpenJDK class library, which would take maybe half a programmer-
year for someone with the right experience.

Andrew.