Re: GCJ and Sun going GPL (again)

[fernando at lozano dot eti dot br]

Hi Marco,

> I'm sorry to bring this question up again, although it was already there 
> twice, but I didn't get a satisfying view of how GCJ will react on the 
> latest Sun actions.
> 
> In my opinion, the two cool things about GCJ were that:
> 1. it was open source and free
> 2. that it allows static and shared native compilation
> 
> Well, point one is no longer an advantage because a Sun JRE/JDK has way 
> less bugs/problems and is more stable. Point 2 still completely rocks 
> and is a real enhancement to the Java world.
> So, to get the best out of the native compilation, it would make sense 
> to use the class library from Sun instead of the one from GNU classpath. 


I'm not a gcj or classpath hacker, but a user and I am not satisfied with the current state of Sun
Java libraries, specially AWT and Swing. I thing theres lot of room for improvement, and that could
come from either Classpath itself or from classpath hackers working on Sun codepage.

Among the problems:

1. International keyboard layouts won't work with Linux. I have to choose between typing {. <. \ and
other symbols required for Java programas or accented characters like á. ç. ã that I need in
comments and strings.

2. Swing font rendering sucks, it's ugly and very slow

3. GTK "native layout" doesn't work at all on my Fedora / Red Hat Systems

4. Cut-and-paste works sometimes and other times not, and most of the time using mouse and keyboard
conventions different from the Gnome desktop

The fact is, the few AWT and Swing apps that work with current Classpath (release, not CVS) look
*much* better and have improved usability (keyboard, cut-and-paste) than with Sun JRE.

Those are the things that bother me, but there are other, like the poor HTML suppport from Sun
Swing. It looks Classpath hackers already have some improvements to that in CVS.

Other reason to continue working with GCJ and Classpath is the fact Sun Java supports few
architectures. No Power or ARM Linux, for example.

It will be very nice if Hotspot and the class library happens to have a modular architecture that
allows mixing parts of their code with parts of Classpath, GCJ, Kaffe, etc, so we could in a short
time improve compatibility, performance and plataform support for all open source Java projects.


[]s, Fernando Lozano