Why didn't Jikes take off?

Why didn't Jikes take off?

Posted Mar 3, 2005 20:50 UTC (Thu) by pimlott (subscriber, #1535)
In reply to: Why didn't Jikes take off? by edconn
Parent article: IBM's latest gift to the community

The answer to this question is probably complex--I think Jikes definitely had the potential to be a huge hit, even as only a compiler (BTW, I believe there was an associated VM project that never reached the same maturity). One rather stupid reason for Jikes's failure to take off may have been the ideosyncratic operating modes (never fully specified) of Sun's javac, which I believe (going off rusty memory) Jikes never perfectly mimicked. javac is hard enough to work into a build system that also supporting Jikes is quite challenging. And Jikes had its share of bugs and discrepancies with javac--not that it was worse, but it made it hard for it to overcome "the standard".

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