Re: [discuss] Limewire on free JVMs.

>That's not the right point of view. I wanted to emphasize the fact that 
>Java is not backward compatible. So if LimeWire starts developing with Java 
>5 specific features, it won't compile or run on Java 1.4 without 
>modifications. It's been already hard in the past to support Java 1.3.1 and 
>Java 1.1.8 on MacOS 7/8/9, and this justified stopping active development 
>for Java 1.1.8 (at the same time, this meant that LimeWire would no more be 
>easily portable to legacy pseudo-Java platforms like the now defunct MSVM).

Well of course java is not backward compatible - this means to add no new 
features at all.
But it will stay compatible to future releases as it has always been (except 
1.0 -> 1.1) - you can still run ugly 1.1 code under 1.5 with no problems at 
all..
Furthermore are free jvms no legancy JVMs, why do you think so?
Have you tried one of them lately?


>May be Java will resurrect on the MS platform one day, when a compliant JVM 
>will be ported to native .NET (a VM in a VM...); this will only happen and 
>be successfull if full JVM compliance is implemented (the really difficult 
>work would be to port the JNI interface to the .NET CLI... this was already 
>the most problematic issue in MSVM which just implemented a part of Java 
>1.1, and I am
wrong!
this was only a political and licensing issue - JNI is quite simple to 
implement and not even a very great choice (I am sure today SUN would do it 
different).
Btw. there is already a FREE jvm that is able to run on top of .NET and Mono 
and this FREE jvm implements already jni withought any native code.
Thats freedom - it allows you to do whatever you want to do with your code 
withought having Sun's ok.

>not convinced that the .NET platform offers enough interfaces to allow such 
>development, as if Microsoft had deliberately wanted to remove that 
>possibility in order to fully control the .NET engine, notably in the way 
>it manages its internal memory resources and locks for its JIT compiler. 
>See for example the various limitations of the .NET interface with C and 
>C++ and you'll understand the problem, which will become extremely critical 
>when trying to port the Java garbage collector so that it will be able to 
>run without locking the entire system and all running threads). So if it 
>happens one day, it won't be on the MS implementation of .NET but on a 
>concurrent .NET VM, with documented APIs to allow such dual-VM mode, based 
>on a common micro-VM (may be Sun will be that concurrent supplier of a 
>microVM that will support both VMs with a common resource management.)
Hmm, as said it is already done - and conforms mostly to the spec.
It allows even java-bytecode -> .net bytecode compilation and has tons of 
other great features.

>Final note: LimeWire does use the JNI interface for integration of a few 
>system-specific functions or emulation of missing features to solve 
>platform-specific issues.
And whats the problem?

Sorry if I did not get the point of your mail - however I can imaginge what 
you tried to explain me.
However classpath  (http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath) based jvm's are 
not legancy one - they make great progress every month and now have now 
about 92-95% of all stuff implemented of java-1.4 - and are even in progress 
releasing their first generics release. And who sais LimeWire should limit 
itself just because classpath compatibility - if something does not work 
with classpath because of a spec violation it can be easily fixed withought 
waiting for bug-reports 3 months till you have to try another 3 weeks to 
tell an engineer why this is a bug and wait 3 years till the bug is fixed in 
an OFFICIAL release (well we all know SUN ;) ).

lg Jacob

btw. Unfortunetly no reaction from LW staff at all, I ask myself why. If 
they just would add a mega-bounty I am sure someone would be there who would 
do the job (I think I am not exprienced enough).
And this would lead to far more LW users that just another feature that 
grows the code and noone finds ;-)

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