RFC: Make gnu.classpath.Pointer work

Wed Jan 17 16:55:00 GMT 2007

Tom Tromey wrote:
> >>>>> "Gary" == Gary Benson <gbenson@redhat.com> writes:
>> Gary> Is this patch all that's needed to make gnu.classpath.Pointer
> Gary> an analogue of gnu.gcj.RawData?
>> I don't think Pointer works like RawData, and without extra work on
> the JNI code, this patch will result in bugs. Furthermore I think
> it would probably be more trouble than benefit to actually do this
> work on the JNI code, since it would mean keeping a divergence
> around forever.
>> Pointer is a base class with 2 concrete subclasses: Pointer32 and
> Pointer64. The Classpath JNI code creates an instance of one of
> these subclasses depending on the system it is running on. Each
> of the subclasses is just a plain old Java class, and each wraps a
> value (either int or long) which is a cast C pointer. When a real
> C pointer is needed, the value is extracted and cast back. See
> jni/classpath/jcl.c.

Ooooh, I didn't realise. I looked in Pointer.java, saw it was
an empty class, and assumed it was the same thing as RawData. 
Thanks, and sorry for the noise,
Gary