Re: [Gc] Simple boehm fix

On 22/08/16 18:18, NightStrike wrote:
> I guess if there's a lack of [GCJ] maintainers, then nothing can be done.

Sightly off topic here, but:

gcj is indeed Java 5(ish).  Java 5 is obsolete.

Java in use is moving more and more towards a highly dynamic language,
with dynamic optimization.  It is possible to write static-ish Java
code, but it's not idiomatic.  This means that any purely
ahead-of-time Java compiler is at a severe disadvantage.

The Classpath project, which provided GCJ's runtime library, is nearly
dead.  We could use the libraries from OpenJDK, but converting GCJ to
use them would be expensive and time-consuming.  For one thing, the
virtual machine is much more complex than it was, and has many more
interfaces we'd have to add.  And there are new bytecode instructions
to support a more dynamic language interface.

For GCJ to live we'd have to start to use a more recent version of the
OpenJDK libraries, but we'd still be at a disadvantage with modern Java
code.  It's not worth it.

Andrew.