A shame [LWN.net]

A shame

Posted Apr 7, 2005 12:36 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165)
In reply to: A shamei by faassen
Parent article: GCJ - past, present, and future

As the original article said, "Very little of Free Software is written in Java, aside from what might be used by those already obliged to use Java". Certainly Java coders are writing lots of code for their own use -- scratching their own itch, not that there's anything wrong with that -- but very little of it escapes to the wider world. Instead of counting defunct Sourceforge projects, try counting packages in the distribution you're running right now, omitting compilers and libraries. You'll find thousands of C, hundreds of C++, and a bare handful of Perl, Python, Scheme, OCaml, and what-have-you. That is as it should be.

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Lists of packages

Posted Apr 7, 2005 13:07 UTC (Thu) by mjw (subscriber, #16740) [Link]

try counting packages in the distribution you're running right now, omitting compilers and libraries. You'll find thousands of C, hundreds of C++, and a bare handful of Perl, Python, Scheme, OCaml, and what-have-you. That is as it should be.

I think that is a fair comment. Compared to the rest of the GNU system the support for the java programming language is just maturing. For the free software distributions we will certainly rely on the more traditional languages for years to come.

To see what we get from adding support for the java programming language to the different distributions you can take a look at:

Mostly compilers and libraries at the moment.

For writing new free software desktop applications in the java programming language I would recommend looking into the java-gnome bindings. Then you can hook up with much more traditional free software libraries. Not just Gnome/GTK+, but also cairo, dbus, gstreamer, etc.

Lists of packages

Posted Apr 7, 2005 23:54 UTC (Thu) by Xman (subscriber, #10620) [Link]

Compared to the rest of the GNU system the support for the java programming language is just maturing.

Agreed. That's exactly why gcj4 is good news.

A shame

Posted Apr 7, 2005 18:06 UTC (Thu) by jonabbey (subscriber, #2736) [Link]

I've been working for nearly 10 years now on a GPL'ed program, in Java, for managing changes to directory services.. see http://www.arlut.utexas.edu/gash2/. It's up to around 250k lines of code at the moment.

That web page hasn't been updated in awhile, but we've been extremely busy here working on 2.0, and we'll be "relaunching" it in the next month or two.

Got to get back to my xemacs window now, in fact.