Java on uClinux (was: Null pointer check elimination)

Tue Nov 15 11:24:00 GMT 2005

Bernd Schmidt writes:
 > David Daney wrote:
 > > Perhaps not in general, but one unstated premise of this whole thread is 
 > > that for some GCC targets (most Unix like operating systems) you *can* 
 > > count on a SIGSEGV when you dereference a null pointer. The java front 
 > > end takes advantage of this fact to eliminate explicit checks for 
 > > dereferencing of null pointers.
 > 
 > Oh.
 > 
 > Speaking of which, has anyone ported gcj to a MMU-less uClinux platform yet?
It's impossible with the current config. This is because some of
libgcj is written on C++, and the C++ compiler FE does not insert
checks for null pointer accesses. I wrote a small patch to do this
but it was rejected.
Andrew.