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Re: Reconsidering gcjx
On Fri, Jan 27, 2006 at 11:09:11PM +0100, Laurent GUERBY wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-01-27 at 09:25 -0500, Kaveh R. Ghazi wrote:
> > > ecj is written in java. This will complicate the bootstrap process.
> > > However, the situation will not be quite as severe as the Ada
> > > situation, in that it ought to be possible to bootstrap gcj using any
> > > java runtime, including mini ones such as JamVM -- at least, assuming
> > > that the suggested implementation route is taken.
> >
> > I would really hesitate to follow Ada in this regard.
> >
> > IMHO, writing your frontend in the same language it's intended to
> > compile causes it to be marginalized. It no longer becomes part of
> > the default bootstrap sequence and gets much less testing. You'll
> > find patches that were supposedly "bootstrapped and regtested" will
> > quite often break java because it didn't get tested as part of the
> > default.
Two interesting things I'd like to point out here:
- I don't know if it's been a problem lately, but GNAT definitely
used to have issues with not just the language it was written
in, but what specific version of the compiler was used to
bootstrap. ECJ, hopefully, will be less problematic.
- People already marginalize gcj because libjava takes so bloody
long to build. If ECJ can be noticably faster than GCJ is,
this might have the opposite effect.
--
Daniel Jacobowitz
CodeSourcery