Cygnus Solutions supports Tim Wilkinson and Kaffe

[Per Bothner]

I would like to let the Kaffe community know that Tim Wilkinson,
author of the free Java VM "Kaffe", is working part-time for
Cygnus Solutions as a contractor.  This situation started in April,
and the current agreement lasts until Summer.

The goal of this agreement is to allow Tim to spend more time
improving Kaffe (and less time seeking non-Kaffe-related income).
One specific Cygnus need is for Kaffe to support Java classes
that have been pre-compiled using Gcc.  

Cygnus believes that it makes sense to compile ahead-of-time many Java
classes and applications, using Java in ways people using C or C++,
and using conventional compiler and debugger technology.  To that
effect we are working on a Gcc "front-end" to compile Java
source and byte-codes to native code, and we are also working
on enhancing Gdb to understand Java (both ahead-of-time-compiled
and JIT-compiled).  This will target Kaffe for the run-time
environment (which will also allow dynamically loaded classes
when suitably configured).  (While we hope to make a rough prototype
available early Autumn 97, this will probably be little more than a
proof-of-concept demo, and we do not yet know when we will have
a complete usable implementation.)

We home this project will be a good example of how commercial
companies, individuals, and volunteers on the Net can co-operate
to build high-quality freely-redistributable software.

	--Per Bothner
Cygnus Solutions     bothner at cygnus.com     http://www.cygnus.com/~bothner