[kaffe] current status?

[Dalibor Topic]

Hi Andy,

--- Andrew Mermell <amermell@usa.net> wrote:
> Hello,
> Could someone please give me a brief idea of what's happening with kaffe at
> this point?  Is it in much use on the PowerPC?

we've just frozen the code for the first developement branch release, 1.1.0,
coming on sunday. recent java apps running with kaffe include freenet, nice,
jetty and jython ... it supports java sound, jaxp, regexps, a modern class
loading implementation and has a ton of ports. ;)

some people have used it on powerpc in embedded settings, there are ports to
darwin, linux, machten, aix and netbsd, and there is a powerpc jitter in
JanosVM that could be merged in if someone volunteers. I don't think that we
have anyone working on the powerpc ports at the moment, so if you can help out,
you're more than welcome.

I'm not aware of any usage statsics for kaffe, but I'd assume it's 'market
share' on darwin and linux should be way below the offerings from ports of
sun's implementation, since it doesn't have the feature set of JDK 1.2 yet ...
but that's being worked on, in part through cooperation with the GNU Classpath
project, in part through cooperation with other sources.

> I see that kaffe was included in Redhat 6 but is no longer being distributed
> by them as of RH7.3.  From your perspective, why did they do that and what
> are
> the implications for a redhat user?

I assume that RedHat decided to concentrate on making its own gcj better
instead of supporting several virtual machine/class library/compiler
implementations. I can't really speculate about the implications for a RedHat
user, since I'm not using RedHat myself.

Since kaffe is developing at a rather quick pace, many of our regular mailing
list contributors seem to keep up with the developement using anonymous CVS.
The developement release series could be an opportunity for distributors to
catch up more quickly with the lastest progress. We'll see if they really do
it. On the other hand, the code in the CVS is quite useable most of the time ;)

cheers,
dalibor topic

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