Itanium (was gcj 3.0 post-mortem)

["Boehm, Hans" <hans_boehm at hp dot com>]

> From: Tom Tromey [mailto:tromey@redhat.com]
> I believe in the end the IA-64 Linux and Solaris
> ports did not work.  This happened because the new EH code required
> more work than we had anticipated, and our lone Java EH expert, Andrew
> Haley, was scheduled to work on other projects during the window we
> needed his expertise.
> 
To correct some previous misstatements on my part:

I would rate gcj3.0 on Linux/IA64 as only semi-broken.  It seems to be
usable for some small things.  Things that don't work for me:

1) Catching NullPointerExceptions.  Andrew pointed out that some other
exception-related things do work with a sufficiently recent linker, which I
didn't have initially.

2) -g1, or any set of options that defaults to -g1, e.g. no compile options.

3) I still have some problems with compiling multiple .class files, though I
doubt those are IA64-related.

I think we have agreement that the first two are really broken in 3.0.

On the positive side, I can build the command-line version of my
constructive reals calculator from source on Itanium with gcj 3.0, and it
seems to run correctly.

Hans