Re: Question of the status of GCJ

On Wed, 2009-02-18 at 10:16 +0000, Andrew Haley wrote:
> Bryce McKinlay wrote:
> > On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 7:36 PM, Andrew Haley <[email protected]> wrote:
> >> 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.
> 
> That's true.  I guess my problem is that I'm not very interested in all
> that AWT/Swing stuff.  :-)
> 
> > 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.
> 
> I don't think that there is any need at all for the OpenJDK code to
> be checked in to the GCC repository.  glibc is happily outside the
> GCC repo, after all.  All the work could be done in the IcedTea
> repository.

To combine those two remarks. One idea might be to follow the JigSaw [1]
proposal and have the same "core" module as OpenJDK with its own
lang/io/net/security/util/etc stuff for libgcj inside the GCC tree. And
then have all "higher-level" modules separately (but hopefully still
pre-compiled). That of course depends on the details of the JigSaw
proposal, but it seems an attractive route to investigate if you want
"additional libraries" outside the GCC repo and a way to gradually move
towards alternative core libraries on top of (lib)gcj.

Cheers,

Mark

[1] http://blogs.sun.com/mr/entry/jigsaw