[kaffe] Embedded use (Zip libs, Qt etc.)

[Jukka Santala]

I'd like to remind that a large amount of itnerest to Kaffe comes from the
perspective of use on embedded, reduced resource and otherwise exotic
systems. On the desktop scene for example, Kaffe can hardly compete with
Sun, and even the free-software community seems to be edging to turn more
towards Wonka and GCC than Kaffe. That having been said, Pocketlinux'
Kaffe was and still is one of the most complete and best embedded
solutions. For that reason I'd like to see Kaffe.org's version try to
reach its full potential in this avenue.

This is mostly a generic musing, since I haven't had time to run actual
performance/resource comparisions lately. However, the notion that the
more of Kaffe is written in Java, the better, is one I have some trouble
with.  I can understand the desire to unify codebase, but the effects on
performance and resource use quoted here make me question if it's worth it
for embedded systems where every byte counts. So, I suppose, make that a
vote for considering the performance of the old implementation one of the
things implemented better in the old version. As usual, I'd be happy with
a compile-time selection between the two, altough I realize maintaining
multiple versions isn't easy either.

And yes, this was posted as a generic embedded use note, because I also
noted that Qt Embedded is now being recommended, with porting FGL etc.
over apparently no longer considered. Again, real impact is hard to
measure withotu actually doing the port, but it would seem that Qt
Embedded pulls in along a lot of stuff that just isn't needed for basic
Kaffe operation. In this case I suppose Qt Embedded might do if you're
willing to forego it not being free software, but in general I'd like to
see embedded/restricted environment use taken more into consideration, or
a statement to the effect that it isn't a design objective for Kaffe.org's
version if that's the case.

 -Jukka Santala