Re: gcj and xgamestation

[Geoffrey Poremba <xgeoff at yahoo dot com>]

Thanks, unfortunately I don't think I have the expertise to do this.  My experience is almost all
with high level languages.  This is one of the reasons I am intrigued with the xgamestation
project, it seems like a great way to learn more about the bits and bytes and low level
operational aspects of computers.

I did actually read the threads about size and please forgive my ignorance, but I have some
questions:

So, my understanding is that the way gcc, or any c compiler, works is to take c code as text
files, compile it and link it such that in the end, you have an executable that will run, without
any external files, on the machine it was compiled for.

It runs (correct me if I'm wrong) because by the time it is compiled to an executable it is pure
machine code.

Typically these files are bigger than if they had been done in assembler, but with advances in
compilers over the years my impression is that it is not a huge difference.

So I would assume that gcj would do the same thing, in terms of taking a text syntax (in this case
java, which is supposed to be close to c) and converting it into machine code through a compiling
and linking process.

So why would a "Hello World" program in gcj compile to an executable that is larger than one
created by gcc, or any other c compiler or really any other programming language compiler?

Thanks!

Geoff

--- Tom Tromey <tromey@redhat.com> wrote:
> >>>>> "Geoffrey" == Geoffrey Poremba <xgeoff@yahoo.com> writes:
> 
> Geoffrey> However, your project sounds like exactly what I would need
> Geoffrey> in order to program in Java, but compile programs to native
> Geoffrey> machine code.  My only question is whether you support this
> Geoffrey> processor.  The target processor right now is the Motorola
> Geoffrey> 68HCS12 16-bit processor @ 25 MHz.
> 
> As far as I know, libgcj has never been ported to this chip, or, for
> that matter, any other 16-bit processor.  It might be possible, but
> would probably be difficult.  For one thing you'd probably need to
> solve the longstanding size problem -- libgcj is quite large, and for
> a system like that you'd want to trim it down quite a bit.  However,
> currently there is no way to do that.  See the gcj list archives for
> plenty of discussion of this topic.
> 
> Tom


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