Kaffe and Cygnus Java plans

[Godmar Back]

> 
> We are still working on Java front-end for GCC (the web page was
> very recently updated).
> 
> We are not at this point working on modifying Kaffe to work with
> code compiled with Gcc.  We did in the past, and Kaffe presumably
> still includes most of those changes we/I made to make Kaffe
> interoperate with Gcc.
> 
> Gcc for efficiency needs to target a very specific run-time API,
> and it was just logistically (and otherwise) difficult to target
> a runtime that was also rapidly being changed elsewhere.  After
> Gcc/Java has stabilized some, and it has been released, maybe someone
> will work on making Gcc and Kaffe compatible.  But I think that is
> up to TransVirtual, not Cygnus.
> 

 Per, your updated webpage still says you're 'enhancing the existing Kaffe
free Java VM to make it full-strength and to support linking with 
pre-compiled class libraries.'

Further down it says:  'We have a preliminary Java run-time environment 
we call "libjava".'  That's somewhat confusing.  It also seems you're not
concerned with threading and garbage collection, at least I couldn't find
it mentioned.

I personally don't think that the part of the Kaffe run-time that your
project is concerned with is still changing rapidly, but I might not be able
to oversee all of it.  I think the last major change was the introduction
of the sysdepCallMethod method, and later of JNI, but (naively) I'd assume
that that's in the direction that you'd go anyway.  Most current work in 
Kaffe in my opinion is in getting the (java) libraries right and fixing 
platform incompatibilities.  The native libraries need to be rewritten to 
use JNI, but that's at this point more of a monotonic task.

	- Godmar