GCJ with OpenJDK Java API instead of GNU Classpath

Thu May 7 13:25:00 GMT 2009

2009年5月7日 Bryce McKinlay <bmckinlay@gmail.com>:
> On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 10:17 AM, Andrew Haley <aph@redhat.com> wrote:
>>> It's all GPL + exception, so there are no licence difficulties.
>>>> This would be an excellent thing to do, but it would be difficult.  In
>> particular, class loading and class initialization are done in very
>> different ways, and this would all need to be rewritten.
>>>> I'd love someone to do this, but I don't want them to be under any illusion
>> about how difficult it might be.
>> I don't think this is quite as hard as Andrew suggests. Certainly,
> making GCJ work with low level OpenJDK classes like Object, Class, and
> ClassLoader would be a lot of work - but pretty much everything above
> that should work out-of-the-box, and provide the vast majority of the
> compatibility benefits.
>> There's also no reason why the merge can't be done gradually, ie one
> package at a time. We did that with the original libgcj-Classpath
> merge.
>> Bryce
>
There's actually no need to do a wholesale replacement of everything.
GCJ already overrides quite a number of classes from GNU Classpath
with its own versions (including Object IIRC). Quite a number of
packages in Classpath are just pure Java and are used as is in GCJ.
This even extends to Swing, where the native JNI code from Classpath
is used (GCJ usually prefers CNI).
It really depends what you want the end result to be. Having some
hybrid with all the packages is probably an easier goal than trying to
pass the TCK with the result... ;)
I'd certainly be interested in any such efforts as well.
-- 
Andrew :-)
Free Java Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc. (http://www.redhat.com)
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