[kaffe] current status?

[Daniel Veillard]

On Fri, Jun 06, 2003 at 12:45:46PM -0700, Jim Pick wrote:
> On Fri, 2003-06-06 at 10:37, Andrew Mermell wrote:
> > 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'm not surprised that they dropped it.  Even though Kaffe has been
> around since 1997, the project was quite fragmented, and the Java
> compatibility was quite lacking.  So it has been quite frustrating to
> use previous versions of it.  I think the 1.1.0 release will be quite a
> bit nicer, even though it's just doing to be a "development" release, as
> the whole project seems to be gaining some momentum which it didn't have
> in the past -- thanks to the hard work of the volunteer developers and
> the free Java community.

  I think the lack of new release for a very long time was one of the
reason, another one was the amount of bugs/obsolescence as Java evolved,
the third one is the use of the gjc compiler when trying to use the
small apps where kaffe was used. I am happy seeing kaffe being actively
maintained again, I can't make any promises w.r.t. reinclusion in Red Hat
(I'm a Red Hat employee), but my understanding is that if kaffe gets
good enough to run non-trivial applications and users of those applications
care about running a free JVM, kaffe may be reintroduced. I think this
boils down to Kaffe getting Java users outside the embedded system
segment, if the project tries to get there and succeeds then it will
naturally finds it place back in the Linux (not only Red Hat) systems.
I understand that Kaffe will look more attractive to users of embedded
systems, maybe the project needs to decide if getting back on general
pupose OSes is really a primary target, maybe my perception is just wrong
too :-)
  It was interesting to see the JBoss attempt, I think if Kaffe manage to
get robust and complete enough for such applications then it would have
a bright future. Another point is the possibility to reuse the work done
on the Mono project about JIT'ing apparently they are getting good
performances (considering the age of the project), making the economy of
scale by reusing another code generator may have a strong impact, they
are starting to run Java apps too, this should be investigated IMHO :-)

  Good luck !

Daniel

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