Announcement: micro-libgcj 0.1

Mon Sep 11 15:43:00 GMT 2006

For those who are interested, I'd like to announce micro-libgcj 0.1. This 
release is a rewrite based on GCC 4.1.1 and has benefitted from the 
feedback I received on this list for the original release back in January.
New in this release:
 - Better compatibility with Java. Most importantly, the controversial, 
non-standard synchronization semantics of 0.0 have been reverted to the 
standard Java semantics.
 - A small subset of java.io is now included
 - Optional SWT support for GUI development (micro-swt)
That last one is probably the most interesting. Micro-swt is based on CNI 
instead of JNI, which makes it faster and easier to debug. Paired with 
micro-libgcj, it allows you to create small, standalone, multiplatform GUI 
apps in Java. For example, SWT's ControlExample weighs in at around 1MB 
or less when run through UPX.
Micro-libgcj 0.1 is available as a patch against the GCC 4.1.1 source 
tree. Thus, the same sources are shared between the libgcj and 
micro-libgcj builds. The Java sources are preprocessed using a simple 
Perl script inspired by Kawa's PreProcess. Also, an experimental branch 
based on a recent GCC 4.2.0 snapshot is available.
More information is available at http://ulibgcj.sourceforge.net. 
Feedback is welcome.
 - Joel