Reconsidering gcjx

Fri Jan 27 22:09:00 GMT 2006

>>>>> "Joe" == Joe Buck <Joe.Buck@synopsys.COM> writes:

Joe> But before fighting the political battles, we should first figure out if
Joe> this is what we really want to do if there weren't political obstacles.
Joe> Let's try coming to a technical consensus first.
I made a list of things which would have to be addressed, based
mostly on this thread.
- Make ecj emit .jar files
- Change ecj's error reporting format
 Right now it is quite ugly and doesn't conform to GNU standards.
- Consider putting column numbers in debug info
 Though as far as I know, nothing uses this today, so I think this
 is low priority.
- Check compile time performance.
 We don't want to slow gcj down too much.
- Make bootstrapping simpler.
 Some small library refactorings would make it quite simple,
 amounting to downloading a single jar file.
- Exception regions as mentioned by Andrew.
 I'm not sure what we need to do here.
- Fix variable slot tracking for bytecode
 I don't recall exactly what the problem here was.
These last two are already present in today's compiler, though
switching to ecj would exacerbate the situation.
Tom