Re: Stable release?

[Bryce McKinlay <bryce at albatross dot co dot nz>]

Matt Welsh wrote:

> This situation is certainly hurting the GCJ project. GCJ is really getting
> to the point where it's a powerful and robust Java compiler, but unfortunately
> not many people know about it or use it -- perhaps because there's a lot
> missing from the old version posted on the website.

gcj has come a long way, but I'm not sure if its really ready for a stable
release yet. Inner class support in particular is really something that is
turning people away and should be in the next release, and there are quite a few
bugs in gnats that need to get fixed.

> Also, the startup cost to start working with GCJ is too high. Making a
> clearly labelled "stable" GCJ version, all packaged up and ready to use,
> would go a long way towards solving this problem. Right now in order to use
> GCJ you either get to (a) grab the old 2.95.1 release, (b) get 2.95.2 and
> find some patches on a mysterious website referred to in one of Bryce's
> postings to the mailing list months ago; or (c) sweat through grabbing the
> latest CVS tree, which nobody knows whether it's broken or not.

Perhaps the best solution would be to make a "semi-official" patch against 2.95.2
and post it on the gcj website. I've already done most of the work for that, and
its not really much work to drop in a few extra patches every month or two to
keep it in sync with libgcj. We won't be changing anything outside of the Java
front end, so it would be a better base to work with for people who are concerned
about bugs in other parts of the compiler, and because it works on more
platforms.

The jboolean bug I alluded to in 2.95.2 earlier actually does show up in the cvs
version as well, so when it gets fixed there we can likely fix it in the 2.95.2
patch as well. (the bug only appears when you compile from .class files, .java
compilation and the interpreter are unaffected).

  [ bryce ]