Re: GCJ with OpenJDK Java API instead of GNU Classpath

[Bryce McKinlay <bmckinlay@gmail.com>]

On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 10:17 AM, Andrew Haley <aph@redhat.com> wrote:

> It's all GPL + exception, so there are no licence difficulties.
>
> This would be an excellent thing to do, but it would be difficult.  In
> particular, class loading and class initialization are done in very
> different ways, and this would all need to be rewritten.
>
> I'd love someone to do this, but I don't want them to be under any illusion
> about how difficult it might be.

I don't think this is quite as hard as Andrew suggests. Certainly,
making GCJ work with low level OpenJDK classes like Object, Class, and
ClassLoader would be a lot of work - but pretty much everything above
that should work out-of-the-box, and provide the vast majority of the
compatibility benefits.

There's also no reason why the merge can't be done gradually, ie one
package at a time. We did that with the original libgcj-Classpath
merge.

Bryce