GC failure w/ THREAD_LOCAL_ALLOC ?

Wed Mar 20 15:03:00 GMT 2002

On 20 Mar 2002, Tom Tromey wrote:
> Yikes! I've been thinking that gcj 3.1 was, even right now, the best
> one yet. So I'm really surprised to hear this.

Certainly 3.1 will be the most complete. As for bugs, well, hard to
say... each application stresses the compiler/runtime in different ways,
so what might seem perfect to one will be buggy to another.
> Is the GC problem the only one?

I don't understand this one yet. I might've done something stupid, but
other than turning off THREAD_LOCAL_ALLOC this is a pretty normal build.
> Do you know of other regressions?

Problems with java.net.Socket, for which I'm going to check in a partial
fix soon. I don't know if we have any good testsuites for this... haven't
checked Mauve lately.
> Are there PRs you consider critical?

Due to java/5986 I can't compile from bytecode at all. I first thought
this was a fairly isolated case but I've found others in which simply
compiling from source rather than bytecode corrected the problem.
I can't say for sure this is a regression though... the test case in that
PR failed on 3.0.4 too.
> I do have some time right now for dealing with 3.1 release issues. I
> don't know how long this time will last, so I'm trying to strike while
> the iron is hot. If you could submit PRs for the serious
> (regression-level) problems you know of, and send me the numbers, that
> would help a lot.

Thanks. I have very limited time right now, but I'd like to be able to
use 3.1 for production, so I have an interest in stablizing it too.
Unfortunately it's hard to say what must be fixed until I understand the
problem... frequently it takes more effort to file a good PR than to
actually fix it. The remaining issues (GC, EH) are likely to be difficult
to isolate. I'll do what I can.
Jeff