[kaffe] What bugs me about your news is that you don't really seem to specify which version of Java you are porting to.

[Jim Pick]

When version we are targetting is really a fuzzy question, so it's hard
to answer.

I think the closest answer I can give you is that we are targetting all
the versions that people contribute code for.  Ultimately, I imagine
that Kaffe will be super configurable, and you'll be able to set it up
anyway you want.  At the moment though, we're missing a lot of APIs that
were introduced since JDK 1.1.

100% compatibility with what Sun calls Java is almost an unattainable
goal for clean room implementations (by Sun's own design) - there are a
huge number of APIs that they are putting into their releases (just look
at the size of the JDK download), and it's always going to be a moving
target.  Fortunately, most applications only use a subset of the Java
APIs, so compatibility (or perhaps we should call it "interoperability")
with a subset is an attainable goal.

There's still a lot of work to do in quantifying where we need to be
compatible.  There is a compatibility page on the website, but there
isn't much up there yet.

Right now, I'd say Kaffe is mostly like a 1.1 JDK, and we're just
getting started on some of the core enhancements that went into 1.2. 
Eventually, we're going to sync up with what the GNU Classpath people
are doing, and that will give us even more stuff.  So depending on your
application, we might already have most of the things you need
implementated, or we might be missing a whole lot of things.  I do want
to get some more analysis of what's missing up on the website, but it
all takes a lot of time.

Cheers,

 - Jim





On Mon, 2002-10-21 at 13:07, Julia Smith wrote:
> I need 1.4.x, but can't tell.
> 
> Some clarification on the Java specification version would be most
> appreciated! =)