[kaffe-announce] Kaffe 1.1.6 "Development" Release available for download

[Jim Pick]

I've made the 1.1.6 release of Kaffe available for download at:

    ftp://ftp.kaffe.org/pub/kaffe/v1.1.x-development/kaffe-1.1.6.tar.gz
    http://www.kaffe.org/ftp/pub/kaffe/v1.1.x-development/kaffe-1.1.6.tar.gz

Much thanks goes to Dalibor Topic for running the project for the last 6
months and putting this release together!

Here are the RELEASE-NOTES:

Release Notes for 1.1.6
=======================

Release 1.1.6 of Kaffe is a "development" release.

It has been tested, but not as thoroughly as a
production release would be. It contains major
improvements over 1.1.5, which was released six
months ago. I anticipate that most people will have
less trouble with this release, and more fun.

Please check the WHATSNEW file to see what has
been added in this release.

Bug reports, comments and patches are always
welcome -- send them to the team at kaffe at kaffe.org.


Platform Specific Notes
=======================

* PowerPC

An PowerPC jitter has been contributed by Tim Stack.
It still needs some effort to make sure it passes
the regression tests. Volunteers would be very welcome.

If you don't want to hack on the PowerPC jit, and just
want to use the interpreter, please make sure that you
pass the option --with-engine=intrp to Kaffe's
configure script.

* ARM

Jiri has reported some success using the libffi, rather
than using Kaffe's own FFI interfaces, so you should
pass --with-libffi to Kaffe's configure script on ARM.

Check the mailing list information for more details. The
Kaffe Team would enjoy having a dedicated ARM hacker to
make the ARM jitter shine again.

* MIPS(EL)

The jit3 implementation needs some more work. Casey
Marshall and Kevin Kissel have looked into it. A MIPS
hacker who would enjoy bringing the jit up to speed
would be very appreciated.

If you are just interested in running applications on
a MIPS(EL) board on Kaffe instead of hacking on the jit
please pass the option --with-engine=intrp to Kaffe's
configure script.

How to help
===========

We would appreciate your help in making Kaffe better,
faster, and nicer. As a collaborative Free Software
project, Kaffe only gets to be as good as its users
and developers make it. If you want to track Kaffe
development, and become a part of the Kaffe community
please join the Kaffe mailing list. Instructions for
joining the list are available at
http://www.kaffe.org/mailinglists.shtml

A lot of informal communication between developers
and users happens on IRC, on the #kaffe channel on
irc.freenode.org. It's a friendly channel where
someone may help you debug or port Kaffe, if you need
hands on help.

If you have looked at Sun's J2SE source code,
or signed NDAs that would prevent you from
contributing to Kaffe, we can not take source code
contributions from you. Otherwise, you're most welcome
to send in patches to the Kaffe mailing list at
kaffe at kaffe.org.

An easy project to get yourself familiar with the source
code base are cleaning up the compiler warnings on
your platform. Every patch is welcome, and appreciated,
no matter how small.

If Kaffe doesn't pass all regression tests executed by
'make check' on your platform of choice under your desired
configuration, patches to fix the regression failures would
also be very appreciated.

We won't ask you for copyright assignment. If you contribute
patches to code coming from other projects, then you should
also send your patches 'upstream' to those projects,
beside contributing it to Kaffe, so that all users of
those upstream projects can benefit from your work.

A particularly important upstream project for Kaffe is
GNU Classpath, which provides the core class libraries.
Even if Kaffe doesn't meat your needs, you are likely
to find another Free Software runtime among the GNU
Classpath family that suits your needs better. A list
of such runtimes is available at
http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/stories.html#jvm

If you are not interested in hacking Kaffe, but want to
hack on GNU Classpath instead, Kaffe provides a quick,
efficient way to get yourself up and running with the
latest GNU Classpath code and have a working development
environment 'out of the box'. While not 100% merged with
GNU Classpath yet, Kaffe follows for the 99% of the merged
classes the developments in the GNU Classpath CVS regularly
in its CVS head, and a script exists in the developers
directory to make keeping in sync with GNU Classpath as
simple as possible.

Future Plans
============

Check out the TODO file for a list of things that are
planned.

Among other things, it is planed to fully switch Kaffe
over to use GNU Classpath out of the box. Help to complete
that task faster would be very welcome.

After making Kaffe the integration melting pot for class
library components, it would be quite interesting to make
Kaffe an integration test bed for runtime components as
well.

If you are looking for an interesting contribution to
make to the core VM, you may want to help with merging
in the new JIT engine, the merge of the gcj verifier
engine, or the efforts to make Kaffe use shared libraries
complied by gcj.

We'd also appreciate help with merging in the various other
interesting developments from Kaffe forks like
JanosVM (Isolation), Latte (Hotspot-like engine),
BeKaffe (BeOS port), KaffeCE (WindowsCE port) and others.

Platform Matrix
===============

The following platforms have been tested for this release:

  arch  |   os     | engine | threads |  gc   | passed
======================================================
  i386  | linux    | jit3   | pthread | kaffe | 147/147
  i386  | linux    | jit3   | jthread | kaffe | 147/147
powerpc | linux    | intrp  | pthread | kaffe | 147/147
powerpc | linux    | intrp  | jthread | kaffe | 147/147


Have fun!

Cheers,

 - Dalibor Topic

(... and Jim Pick)