Re: FYI: Updated "Building GCJ for Windows"

[Andrew Haley <aph at redhat dot com>]

Marco Trudel writes:

 > - reflection (Class.forName(...)) is broken
 > Classes won't be found be Class.forName() (thus throwing an 
 > ClassNotFoundException).
 > Any Ideas? I once read something in the archives, but I'm really unable 
 > to find it again... I hope there's a solution for this.
 > 
 > - serialisation seems to be broken too
 > Writing to files works, loading again fails with (if I remember right) 
 > ClassNotFoundExceptions... Might be because of the reflection problem. 
 > my solution was to write good old ordinary config files
 > 
 > - stacktraces are unusuable
 > Whats the state? I'm relatively new to this list and it seems to be an 
 > old problem. Something like dwarf would be better than sjil exceptions 
 > but don't works on windows or would need a big deal to implement; 
 > there's no active windows maintainer so this keeps open? Am I more or 
 > less in the picture?

All of these bugs are symptoms of a common problem: stack traces don't
work.

The only reasonable way to solve this on Windows is to make DWARF
unwinding work and to write code to allow us to unwind through frames
in DLLs.  We need the latter because sometimes gcc-compiled code is
called as a Windows callback, and it may throw exceptions that require
it to unwind through the DLL.

As far as I'm aware fixing this is tricky but not heroically
difficult.

Andrew.