Bytecode verifier

Thu Mar 18 21:13:00 GMT 2004

One of the most important problems with binary compatibility is the
lameness of the bytecode verifier in gcj. Unless we fix this we won't
be able to have true compatibility, because we can't compile all the
jarfiles that are out there.
I know that there is a somewhat decent verifier in libgcj, so perhaps
we could replace the gcj verifer with that one.
Perhaps we could have a separate verification pass in gcj -- verify
first using the libgcj verifier and then do separate semantic
analysis. That's better than trying to maintain two buggy verifiers.
I don't think the fact that the libgcj verifier is written in C++ is a
show stopper. We could have a verifer library and compile it twice,
once for host and once for target.
Andrew.