creating standalone gij/gcj builds

Thu Feb 26 16:32:00 GMT 2004

listas@lozano.eti.br wrote:
> Hi,
>>>>>I recently used gcj and gij for the first time and am very interested
>>>in this project. However I find it very difficult to use it in eclipse
>>>(and probably any other IDE) as a Standard-VM. It's required to
>>>compile gcc and make various changes to get it working. I'm still
>>>having problems, but this is not the topic of this thread.
>>> Red Hat 8/9 provided a package gck-jdk or something similar, which emulated the
> standard java2 sdk command-line tools but using gcj. It was used to compile
> OpenOffice and was dropped when 1.1 dropped this dependency on its build
> system. You can look for the packages at rpmfind.net and get the sources, to
> recompile or repackage for Debian.
>> But this won't make gcj compatible with IDEs like Eclipse. GCJ doesn't
> implements JPDA, for instance, and provides a different set of bootstrap
> libraries (rt.jar x libgcj.jar). You'd have to implement a lot of Eclipe
> plug-ins, maybe mixing with the gcc/gdb support from the Eclipse CDT, to make
> it work seamless using gcj. Even red hat native eclipse builds can't use gcj as
> the default java compiler, and they need to use a stadard java2 sdk for debugging.
>> Using other free software or proprietary java IDEs is out of question, as they
> need swing. But you can setup a nice working environment using generic
> programming editors like SciTE and Moleskine and debuggers like ddd and gvd.

Please look at the following Debian bug report:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=234518
It describes what you have to click within eclipse to see what I want to 
achieve (only difference is, that it is about kaffe). If you have 
eclipse it's probably the best to start and try it. I had success with 
kaffe1.1.4 (without modifications!) and eclipse 2.1.2.
As far as I understand it, eclipse has an own Java compiler and won't 
use the compiler provided by the used Standard-VM. In my opionion it 
only uses the Standard-VM to run programs. However if you use kaffe/gcj 
as Standard-VM you can always be sure that your programs will run on a 
free VM. If something doesn't work as expected, you'll notice the 
problem immediately. Another good thing is that it allows you to switch 
between VMs very nicely.
Besides the eclipse topic, I think kaffe is more or less, what I was 
looking for. You still have to download and compile kaffe (not a big 
problem in the case of kaffe, but some users won't like to have to do 
it), but it has a structure like Sun's JRE. That's why it has a good 
chance to be supported by IDEs without modifications. gcj with some 
modifications should work, too, but eclipse doesn't give a detailed 
error message, so I couldn't figure out, what the problem is.
Jens