Question of the status of GCJ

Wed Feb 18 09:36:00 GMT 2009

On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 7:36 PM, Andrew Haley <aph@redhat.com> wrote:
>> Marco Trudel wrote:
> > Andrew Haley wrote:
> >> Mike Purdy wrote:
> >>> Thank you Andrew.
> >>> This is interesting. Does the OpenJDK allow native compilation?
> >>
> >> No.
> >
> > But it would be possible with (relatively) less work.
>> Relative to writing the whole thing again, maybe, but still hard.
>> I'd love to find an excuse to do it. gcj is still a very high-
> performance implementation of the Java language.

Such a merge could proceed gradually, along similar lines to the
original Classpath-GCJ merge. It would be a lot of work to merge all
the way down to java.lang, but higher level packages, such as
AWT/Swing, should be able to plug in relatively painlessly and provide
a lot of benefit.
I guess the major stumbling block is persuading the FSF and/or
Steering committee to allow the OpenJDK code in the GCC repository -
otherwise this work would have to proceed in a forked tree.
Bryce