RE: GCJ information

["Ghanta, Bose" <bose dot ghanta at stratus dot com>]

Hi Tom and Java team,

 Thank you for this prompt and very informed and honest mail.  That is why
open software is so successful and the members who contribute are excellent
software engineers.  We like Gcc and Gnu tools a lot.  Excellent set of
tools and a good C and C++ compilers.

We will follow your advise here.  We will down load the recent 3.0.2 and use
it till you (Open Software Community) has 3.1 available for our use.  Once
again I appreciate your prompt response.  Please continue the effort on Java
development.  We want to see an alternative to Sun's Java offering.

Thank you,
Bose

-----Original Message-----
From: Tom Tromey [mailto:tromey@redhat.com]
Sent: Wednesday, December 12, 2001 1:07 AM
To: Ghanta, Bose
Cc: 'java@gcc.gnu.org'
Subject: Re: GCJ information


>>>>> "Bose" == Ghanta, Bose <bose.ghanta@stratus.com> writes:

Bose> We are now looking into a compiler for Java language.  I would
Bose> appreciate if you can provide me information on GCJ and how it
Bose> compares to Sun Java 1.3 release and Hotspot.  Also information
Bose> on features improvements in GCJ.  What is the best GCJ release
Bose> we can bring up?

gcj has most language features, but is still missing `strictfp'.
libgcj has most of the core libraries.  By and large they are close to
1.3 compatibility, I think.  Some things are missing, most notably
AWT.  Some parts aren't well tested.
There is a bytecode interpreter but it is very slow.  There is no
JIT.  There are some missing VM-level features: stack overflow
detection doesn't work and some security features are missing.
As far as performance goes, I don't know.  I don't generally run
benchmarks very often.  I imagine for certain micro-benchmarks we
would do very well.

The best gcj release depends a lot on your needs.  On the one hand,
the current cvs trunk has the most features.  That is where all the
development happens -- and, since gcj is still actively developed, a
lot has changed since the most recent stable release (3.0.x -- I
forget if x==1 or x==2).  On the other hand, the cvs trunk
occasionally is broken in various ways.  So it isn't always a reliable
choice.  When 3.1 comes out, that will be the gcj compiler of choice.
However, that is still some months away.

Tom