LWN: Comments on "Piecing together free java"

* Cacao *

thebohemian — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 21:36:03 +0000

AFAIK cacao supports annotations. I asked twisti about this some time back.

Debugging (JMVTI) and split verification is what it lacks.

However I am working on the latter for my diploma thesis :)

Piecing together free java

robilad — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 20:06:08 +0000

Almost ... it's jikes based, and jikes seems dormant at the moment, so it doesn't actually
support the Java language constructs introduced a few years ago, that are necessary, for
example, for bootstrapping GNU Classpath these days.

Piecing together free java

kleptog — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 18:10:46 +0000

While I'm glad is finally usable on free systems, I can't help wondering how the world would
have looked it if this had been done two or more years ago...

Thank You

tmarble — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 20:56:14 +0000

Mark:

Thank you for helping Sun grok Java in the Free Software world!

--Tom

Piecing together free java

mjw — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 19:47:10 +0000

Yes, Red Hat has been very supportive of all the libre-java efforts. This is also why on Fedora 7 or 8 things just work and build out of the box. But with some small tweaks, as documented on the IcedTea Wiki FAQ, Debian and Gentoo systems can also bootstrap things now. In fact icedtea.classpath.org runs Debian and has a Debian sid chroot in which IcedTea is regularly bootstrapped with the system installed GCJ.

Piecing together free java

arekm — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 17:32:26 +0000

Yeah, I just tried it and it failed with gcc 4.2.2 gcj (1.4.2). So bootstraping icedtea
requires unreleased gcj :-(

Piecing together free java

drag — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 16:56:06 +0000

Yep. 

If you have OpenOffice.org installed from your distribution's package management systems then
more then likely you have GCJ installed. Redhat put a lot of effort into both with the goal of
getting OO.org (and other popular java-based apps) out of the 'Java Trap' and such, if I
remember correctly.

Piecing together free java

nix — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 16:33:03 +0000

Well, you need a 1.5-capable GCJ, which isn't as old as a couple of years :) but anyone can
get it out of the appropriate branch or (if daring) from GCC SVN HEAD (although using the GCC
in SVN HEAD without appropriate genuflections can, I understand, cause ifrits to emerge from
your machine for entirely innocent technical reasons).

Piecing together free java

mjw — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 15:18:19 +0000

You have to have GCJ http://gcc.gnu.org/java installed already yes, that is what IcedTea
relies on. But that is availably on most GNU/Linux distros since a couple of years.

Piecing together free java

arekm — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 14:54:57 +0000

Isn't some java *already* required to even bootstrap icetea? AFAIK the asnwer is "yes" so this
isn't so easy as just ./configure && make. It's much harder. You need to have that "first"
java.

Piecing together free java

rfunk — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 14:25:38 +0000

This meta-package in Debian/ubuntu looks intriguing.....

free-java-sdk - Complete Java SDK environment consisting of free Java tools

C++ interpreter

gbenson — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 14:17:28 +0000

“Sun also released its older C++ based interpreter to help the porting effort”

The C++ interpreter is actually the newer of the two. The template interpreter is the original and is written entirely in assembler, so a port to a new platform involves (amongst other things) writing individual implementations of each of the 200 or so bytecodes. The C++ interpreter has these bytecode implementations in C++ so it's much easier to bring up on a new platform. It was originally written to port Java 1.4.2 to ia64 (ia64 assembly is “special”).

LWN: Comments on "Piecing together free java"

*** Cacao ***

Piecing together free java

Piecing together free java

Thank You

Piecing together free java

Piecing together free java

Piecing together free java

Piecing together free java

Piecing together free java

Piecing together free java

Piecing together free java

C++ interpreter

* Cacao *