RE: Using gcj as an extension language

["Erik Poupaert" <erik dot poupaert at chello dot be>]

>>>> One of the bigger goals was to attract a large body of VB developers
who aren't
supposed to be as technical as C programmers. (I'm somewhere in
between).

Well, the JDK will fail to attract ex-VB programmers; and it's got nothing
to do with fancy IDEs.

I personally don't even use Eclipse. I use Scintilla as an editor. I don't
need code completion; and a stacktrace is more than sufficient as a
replacement for a debugger. As far as I'm concerned, the commandline + Ant
work better than an IDE "project".

>>>>> And yes the libraries are huge. And it's being used heavily in
academic fields to get acquainted with O-O.

Why don't they ship these things to the academic fields only?

For example, if I need CORBA, to interoperate with a CORBA application, I'll
have a look at alternative implementations and I'll figure out by myself,
which community to ask questions to.

>>>>> That's not the JRE you're talking about, don't forget that they can
always use webstart or whatever. That's the jdk.

On WIN2K:

j2sdk1.4.1_01 		64.5 MB (67,718,833 bytes)
j2re1.4.1_01 		35.5 MB (37,319,372 bytes)

>>>>> And have you looked at the size of the shared libraries when compiled
using gcj???

Well, a minGW-produced HelloWorld is 2 Mb stripped, and with upx I can
reduce it to 500 Kb. I can live with that. I hope they'll bring it down,
though.

> with GCJ what I would otherwise have to do with C++, including GUIs.
>>>>> If you can program C++ well, why are you digging into Java?

I can't program well in C++. I can wrestle myself through it. I do it 50
times slower than in Java; and I don't do it for fun; it's simply such a
repulsively complex language. Further, I may understand pointer arithmetic
to some extent, I certainly don't use it routinely as a building block in my
applications.

>>>> So I found out that something that's supposed to be simple like a
>>>> StringTokenizer doesn't even function correctly (this is not meant as
criticism, it's an observation). There is some bug somewhere in
serialization (another fundamental thing).

In Beschränkung der Meister.

If there weren't so many different JDK-inspired add-ons to debug and
support, I'm sure the resources on the project would be more than sufficient
to do an excellent job on the basics.