Java Certification

Sun Dec 1 09:08:00 GMT 2002

On Sun, 1 Dec 2002, james_williams@optusnet.com.au wrote:
> My very specific ideas/goals are philosophical more than technical. I accept
> your technical arguments, however, from a philosophical perspective, many
> people on this mailing list have said it themselves that it is highly
> unlikely that GCJ will ever become certified. Given this situation, GCJ will
> never be "java". If its not "java" then it must be something else anyway.

I'll throw in my perspective as a user of gcj.
My goals are pragmatic. I have a lot of code written in Java. I
periodically test with Sun's VM and gcj. Sun's certification isn't
useful to me; we certify our proprietary application with a
comprehensive suite of unit tests.
For the time being I want our code to compile/run with either Sun's VM or
gcj. So for all practical purposes they are both Java; what we call them
isn't important.
> Designing the new language would be as you pointed out trivial. Kawa enables
> this now. Neither Java nor C# are "open". Why not design the new language
> (and include the things you thought should have been put in) and create a
> process to hash out truly "open" specifications.

There is already a process in which new gcj features are proposed
and accepted (or rejected) regardless of whether they implement Java
compatibility or extensions. How is your suggestion different?
Incidentally, I'm not aware of any free software effort to design a
language with a complete formal specification. I suspect it is too much
work for a group of part-time volunteers. It may also be redundant...
why not let the published source code be its own specification?
> I also believe that the open source community would embrace this with both
> arms.

Why do you think so? A new language would be of marginal use to the
community. Much free software is still written in C today.
> It also looks like as soon as you guys get even close to being done with the
> libjava implementation the copyright police from SUN are going to be all over
> you.

If Sun were planning to do that I doubt they'd need to wait until
libjava is finished. Anyhow I don't think they'd have much of a claim for
copyright infringement given that gcj is a cleam-room effort derived from
Sun's language specifications under fair use.
They could argue trademark infringment, in which case the gcj team may
have to withdraw any mention of Java in the web site or documentation.
I don't think that's likely to happen, and it wouldn't really detract from
gcj anyway.
Jeff