Interesting spin

Posted Aug 29, 2003 19:51 UTC (Fri) by sab39 (guest, #2185)
Parent article: IBM to release new Eclipse to run on Jikes VM (NewsForge)

1) The Red Hat team got eclipse running (very fast, from what I hear) on gcj a month or so ago (as the comments of the linked article mention). It's strange for IBM to be supporting JikesRVM which virtually nobody uses, versus gcj which is well established in the community. Well, maybe not that strange, as JikesRVM is from IBM themselves, but at least a *mention* of gcj would have been appropriate, I think.

2) Jikes RVM is *not* 100% open source, as (last I heard) it requires an "image" file that has to be produced on a proprietary JVM before you can run it.

I understand IBM's motivations and I do appreciate the gesture towards the importance of a fully open-source version of Eclipse. I do wish they'd support it on other VMs like gcj, though - especially as they didn't even have to do the work themselves to get it to work on gcj!

Interesting spin

Posted Aug 29, 2003 20:14 UTC (Fri) by pglennon (guest, #649) [Link]

hmmm... I think you are wrong on that. Jikes RVM is built with Jikes ( OSI Certified ) and uses libraries from GNU Classpath, which are also open source ( free software ).

Interesting spin

Posted Aug 29, 2003 20:24 UTC (Fri) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]

It's strange for IBM to be supporting JikesRVM which virtually nobody uses, versus gcj which is well established in the community.

Java software is supposed to run on every standard compliant Java machine (whether it's a bytecode interpreter, a JIT or a compiler with supporting libraries). I know that the reality is sometimes different from the design goals, but still you seem to go too far in your assumptions

As I understand it, the IBM press release is about Jikes VM that is now good enough to run Eclipse rather than about Eclipse broken enough to run on Jikes VM only, despite it (Eclipse) being a Java program.

Interesting spin

Posted Aug 31, 2003 9:57 UTC (Sun) by biehl (subscriber, #14636) [Link]

Hi,

1) The JikesRVM hackers help out on the GNU Classpath libraries - which is what is really important to get Eclipse running on Free Software (eg GCJ).

2) Yes - it is not (AFAIK) possible to bootstrap JikesRVM with Free Software only - but the source is still open and CPL.

As the newsforge article they announced it to get more people to care about the JikesRVM - which is a noble goal in my book.