[kaffe] Re: Kaffe compatibility with XOM

[Jim Pick]

> >Can I forward this to the kaffe at kaffe.org mailing list?  I think it'll
> >motivate them to get some fixes in for 1.1.1 (which should be out in a
> >few months).

Great!

> On Thu, 2003-06-19 at 03:23, Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:
> 
> Of course. It seems there are really three separate problems:
> 
> 1. There are some compatibility issues with JUnit. This is huge given 
> the number of projects using JUnit these days. This is much more 
> important than any XOM-specific issue. The most immediate problem was 
> the unimplemented Runtime.addShutdownHook.

Agreed.  I've seen those warnings a few times.  I've been meaning to
throw up my Apache Gump results on the website sometime, and getting
JUnit working nicely would help immensely.

> 2. The -Xmx non-standard option to the JVM isn't recognized. It's 
> non-standard but very commonly used by heavyweight programs. Still, 
> not a big deal. I was able to work around this, but it may be related 
> to issue 3:

Actually, I think we do support that particular option.  We do need to
get our command line options more in sync with what's in the JDK though.

> 3. Performance was abysmal on one particular test that uses a lot of memory.
> 
> What I initially thought was a bug in Kaffe's reflection turns out to 
> be probably a bug in JUnit instead. I am investigating that one 
> further. I'll let you know what I find.

Our garbage collection is somewhat primitive compared to what's in JDK
1.4.x, so I wouldn't be surprised if we take a hit in that department. 
On the other hand, I'm very interested in collecting together tests that
really stress the memory management subsystem.

Cheers,

 - Jim

-----Forwarded Message-----


From: Elliotte Harold <elharo at metalab.unc.edu>
To: xom-interest at lists.ibiblio.org
Cc: jim at kaffe.org
Subject: Kaffe compatibility with XOM
Date: 18 Jun 2003 16:16:05 -0400

I spent a little time this afternoon playing with Kaffe 1.10, a clean 
room Java virtual machine published under the GPL. Mostly I wanted to 
see if it could run XOM. Sadly the answer seems to be no, it can't. 

First off the bat, a couple of missing methods (addShutdownHook and 
removeShutdownHook) in java.lang.Runtime prevented the JUnit GUI 
testrunner from running. I tried running the textui for JUnit, and that 
ran.

Once I did that, there appeared to be a reflection bug that picked up a 
non-test-case as a test case, and thus reported an errorneouse failure. 
Most of the other tests passed. However, as I write this the 
EncodingTest is either stuck in an infinite loop or running very slowly.

I regret to report that Kaffe is not yet up to the task of running XOM, 
though it's tantalizingly close. :-(

--
Elliotte Rusty Harold