[kaffe] Kaffe as the main JVM

[Dalibor Topic]

jerome moliere wrote:
> Hi,

Salut Jerome,

> I saw the X dependency from the kaffe code & sounds complicated to have 
> such layer on windows !!!

yes;) there is Xfree for cygwin, but you already ruled Cygwin out.

In theory, there is also a port of kaffe's AWT to MFC in the 
libraries/clib/awt/win32 directory. I have no idea if it works.

> but the other port , requiring  QT is not much more easy to use because 
> this layer has a cost & I'm not sure I can afford a such cost.

If you mean licensing costs, Qt2 us available free of charge for Win32 
systems under a license allowing non-commercial use, see [1]. But 
looking more closely, I see that they have clarified the implications 
for GPLd projects linking to it. So you wouldn't be allowed to link 
kaffe to it.

Your best bet (beside buying a Qt Windows license) is then using (and 
most probably fixing) kaffe's win32-MFC based AWT implementation.

> In fact, my problem is a bandwith one, we must offer a solution 
> requiring the smallest download as possible....

hm, with the current kaffe in CVS on i386-linux, with sound enabled, and 
Xlib based AWT, installed using 'make install-strip', and after removing 
includes, man pages, the kjc compiler, etc, I can put the installation 
on a zip archive of 3051518 bytes. You could probably shave off another 
300k by removing the debugging symbols from the java libraries.

If your customer's applets don't use any of Java 1.4 or 1.3 features, 
you can remove those classes from the class library (sound, jaxp, etc.), 
giving you another big decrease in installation size. A bare bones 
minimal rt.jar is around 350k (without AWT or applet support). The 
full-featured rt.jar is around 2.4M. So there is some room for trimming 
it down if you are sure that you won't need everything.

Note that the numbers on a MSVC++ (or mingw) compiled win32 installation 
are going to be different for the C/C++ binaries. How different I can't 
say, as I haven't built kaffe using MSVC++ (or mingw) myself.

> In fact what about the size of the lightest bundle : VM + QT ?( on windows)
> we should deliver a solution with asize < 2Mb ?

that could be possible, if you don't need things like JAXP, Sound, 
javax.* packages, etc.

cheers,
dalibor topic

[1] http://www.trolltech.com/download/qt/noncomm.html