Re: How hard would be an OpenSource JVM ?

On Sep 1, 2004, at 6:25 AM, theUser BL wrote:

> But how hard is it, to reimplement the plantform-dependent parts (the 
> JVM and .so/.dll libs) as OpenSource and using the 
> platform-independent parts (Java-Classes) from Sun ?

Quite hard actually.  First and foremost, you *can't* use Sun's java 
classes in an implementation of Java that you want to distribute under 
an Open Source license.  Just because Sun lets you see (some) of the 
source code, doesn't make it Free Software... it is still owned and 
controlled by Sun.  So we need projects like GNU Classpath which create 
compatible versions of that part of the Java platform under a Free 
Software license.

Secondly, creating a non-naive compiler/interpreter that executes Java 
binaries with acceptable performance is not a trivial task either.  
That's what all the projects you cited above have been working toward 
for some time now.  As you observed, they have had some success, but 
they are not all the way there.

-wilhelm


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