SWT 3.0 and gcj

Sun Feb 29 19:46:00 GMT 2004

I've tried to compile SWT 3.0 natively, and that lead me to dealing intensively the
Mozilla and Gnome header files, libbonobo, and what have you ... all very far from
what I'm interested in (these things may be useful in themselves, though).
Apparently, they've drastically increased the number of both native and jdk
dependencies (on very specific versions of each), to the point that the exercise of
building SWT 3.0 (natively) has become non-trivial.
Since the SWT project has not stated as a goal or constraint, that SWT should remain
natively compilable, it may still be possible to work around the current problem, but
not necessarily around the next one, or the one after that. It will turn out to be a
losing proposition.
It's just too easy to use constructs that prevent proper native compilation (in a
native-native sense, including linking statically). The next thing on the menu could
be some kind of a SWT container that dynamically loads swtlets to execute, using some
advanced kind of reflection, if you see what I mean ...
I'm looking into retrofitting bug fixes on the 2.x series of SWT (by comparing source
diffs). If anybody is interested in sharing the burden ...