Linux Magazine article

Thu Feb 21 18:06:00 GMT 2002

I just picked up the March 2002 Linux Magazine and it has an article on
gcj. I just read it (see page 48).
It was written by Glenn McAllister (who is on copy). 
Thanks for writing the article Glenn! It's great to see gcj getting
some publicity. Now, on the corrections.... :-)
* The GC library is libgcjgc (just a typo I suppose)
* You say that gcj built apps only work with .so files, and can't open
.jar files to execute bytecode. This should actually work (on some
platforms...).
* The "going half-native" box says that libgcj can interpret .class
files on x86 boxes only. However, it can pull the .class files out of
jar files, and the interpreter is available on more than just x86. This
currently works on x86, IA-64, Alpha and PowerPC.
* We probably don't document this well, so I can understand the
oversight... but... In your example you compile myjarfile.jar into
libmylibrary.so. While this certainly works (as long as you link the
library into your app) there's a better naming scheme for shared
libraries. For instance, org.glenn code in myjarfile.jar should be
compiled to lib-org-glenn.so. That's what is needed for
Class.forName("org.glenn.Foo") to work (as long as lib-org-glenn.so is
in your LD_LIBRARY_PATH). This is an important trick for jdbc drivers
and such which are always loaded by name.
In any case, these are really trivial nit-picks, and the important thing
is that gcj is getting some press. Thanks!!
AG