JNI support?

[Tim Wilkinson]

Andy,

Andy Ross wrote:
> 
> Now that the "official" JDK 1.1.1 has been released for Linux, I'm
> starting to think about the use of Kaffe as a drop-in replacement for
> the Sun JVM.  All the native libraries provided seem to be in JNI format
> (cursorily anyway -- I just looked at the symbol names in the shared
> libraries), so presumably the only large missing piece in Kaffe would be
> support for the JNI standard.  How seriously has anyone looked at doing
> this?  How much would be involved?
> 
> I might be willing to volunteer some time, though unfortunately ICS has
> a copy of the JDK 1.0.2 source which would, I believe, disqualify me.

Unfortunately this is the case - and the work involved is non-trivial.
The clean-room policy is rather annoying in this instance (I had someone
else offering a complete JNI implementation but he'd seen the JDK 1.0.2
sources too), but we're having to keep it this tight just in case Sun's
lawyers ever get bored.
 
> Am I right that the rest of the JVM spec has changed little or not at
> all?  I know that inner classes, at least, are implemented using only
> naming conventions in the class files and don't require any knowlege on
> the part of the interpreter.

Well Sun didn't change any bytecode at least, but the JVM contains many
subtle points which are not documented.  Suffice it to say that Kaffe
0.9.0
(when it's released) will be JDK 1.1.1 compliant though possibly
incomplete.
You cannot use the current Kaffe 0.8.4 with the new classes because
of JVM changes (e.g. they changed the thread class's internal ...
although
they didn't change the version number on it, bless 'em).

Well there you go ...

Cheers
Tim
--
  Tim Wilkinson                         Tel/Fax: +44 181 440 0658
  T. J. Wilkinson & Associates,         Mobile:  +44 370 621006
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