status of ecj branch

Mon Jun 19 23:19:00 GMT 2006

I reached a nice point today and thought I'd send out an ecj status
report.
I've gone through all the lang.exp failures and either fixed them or
filed a PR. PRs 28089 and 28090 are the bugs I know of; also my most
recent patch may require another tweak. I think both of these are
latent bugs, but 28089 is more important now that we're compiling all
of libgcj.so via bytecode. Neither of these is very difficult to fix.
I also have a patch to compile the generics branch of classpath. This
is somewhat involved; in particular it requires a new version of gcjh
to handle bridge methods (more accurately, the methods which are
targets of bridge methods) properly.
I rewrote gcjh in java (since it was simpler) for this purpose. I
think this is ok because we already require a bootstrap VM to run ecj.
The requirements of the new gcjh are simple: the ASM library and
Classpath's getopt code.
I'll make a jar download of ecj and gcjh available at some point.
The test results for the generics branch are identical to the
non-generics code. My current plan is to import the 0.91 generics
branch into svn and then switch the ecj branch to use this. I hope to
do that very soon.
One remaining show-stopping problem is debuginfo. I haven't
researched this enough yet to say much about it, other than things got
worse with ecj and we have to fix that.
Tom