[kaffe] Future directions for Kaffe

[Kiyo Inaba]

>Hi everybody,
Hi Jim and everybody,

Thanks Jim to keep kaffe.org up and running.

>So I'm assuming that the project isn't dead, it's just somewhat dormant.
>It's been somewhat dead/dormant throughout much of it's history, but
>it's still here, isn't it?  :-)

Yes, it's still here! As I posted previously, there should be some
guys still trying to make it better.

>* I'm embarrassed to admit that I don't even have Kaffe running on my
>new MacBook under OS X.  I got it to compile, but I couldn't get it to
>even run "Hello World".  If I spent some time on it, I imagine I could
>figure it out.  I just haven't spent the time.  I hope it still runs OK
>on Linux, but I haven't tried that recently either.

According to the weekly regression test I do, kaffe still works with
(in my environment) for {ia32,m68k}*{linux,netbsd} and sh3*linux. Of
course even the small test suites kaffe provides some errors are
reported and it's good new to me that there are still enough chance
to play with ;-)

>* I think Kaffe probably is still the simplest full JVM implementation
>that isn't just an interpreter.  It's been used for all manner of exotic
>porting projects that might just be too hard to do using something like
>OpenJDK or gcj.

This is the major reason why I still continue to play with kaffe. I
know that kaffe's jit (or jit3) is not at the same level as the state
of art just in time compiler technique, but still it is ok to support
'non major CPU architecture' like mc68030.

>* If anybody is currently doing something interesting with Kaffe, or has
>any aspirations for it, please send some email to the list!  We need the
>ideas and the traffic!

Except for the fixing funny configure trouble introduced to m68k-netbsd
(core dump while configuring), I still try to squeeze my time to make
kaffe work (again) for mc68000 (or coldfire, in these days) or sh3 with
its jit3. I am not sure whether it can be said an 'interesting' project.

Kiyo