GCJ and Sun going GPL (again)

Tue Dec 5 11:38:00 GMT 2006

Hello list
I'm sorry to bring this question up again, although it was already there 
twice, but I didn't get a satisfying view of how GCJ will react on the 
latest Sun actions.
So far only Andrew responded and to me, it looked like the summarized 
answer was "GCJ won't change anything". Is that correct? Tom, what are 
your plans, what do you think?
In my opinion, the two cool things about GCJ were that:
1. it was open source and free
2. that it allows static and shared native compilation
Well, point one is no longer an advantage because a Sun JRE/JDK has way 
less bugs/problems and is more stable. Point 2 still completely rocks 
and is a real enhancement to the Java world.
So, to get the best out of the native compilation, it would make sense 
to use the class library from Sun instead of the one from GNU classpath. 
In my experience, one will most probably always run into bugs when using 
GNU classpath with big or real world projects. There are even more 
problems than the hidden/unknown bugs in the finished parts:
- AWT/Swing is not finished, has a lot of bugs, only works on Linux
- A lot of parts are slow compared to a Sun JRE
- XML doesn't work properly
- crypto has quite a lot of issues
It would be great to switch to the Sun class library to archive a more 
stable, less buggy and up to date GCJ project.
The other thing is the gcj/ecj/javac thing. There, I can't tell much 
about, because I was never directly involved in these. But I think it 
would make sense to use everything from Sun instead from different 
places. But again, I don't know how big the advantage would be.
Anything I missed? Ideas? Hints? Opinions?
The general question summarized again: How will GCJ react on Sun GPLing 
Java?
Marco