Re: Question of the status of GCJ

[Mark Wielaard <mark at klomp dot org>]

Hi Mike,

On Tue, 2009-02-17 at 09:45 -0500, Mike Purdy wrote:
> I would like to ask an admittedly embarrassing question regarding the
> status of GCJ development and its use to natively compile SWT
> applications for Linux, OSX, and perhaps Windows (though this is not an
> immediate need).

I don't have experience with OSX and Windows, but for GNU/Linux this has
been certainly possible for a couple of years already. Others did do
such things for other platforms.

> The embarrassing part is that I've lost track for a while now of where
> GCJ development is at, what version of java it supports, how it relates
> to Sun's open sourcing of java, and what the future development plans
> are for GCJ.  I would like to pick back up soon with the possibility of
> natively compiling a couple projects, but I need to get back up to speed
> with GCJ as a whole first.

The compiler accepts any modern java language feature, the class
libraries are somewhere between 1.5 and 1.6 depending on package. There
are currently no concrete plans to augment the classes with some of
Sun's new GPLed code. But there has already been a patch to make use of
the OpenJDK javac compiler directly (but that hasn't been integrated
yet).

> I appreciate any insight anyone can provide.  Is natively compiling SWT
> applications still supported or feasible?

Certainly, this has been possible for a long time now (a quick search
reveals that people have been doing that since 2003). It would be a
regression if that breaks. In fact the whole eclipse suite can be
compiled and run with gcj. 

Cheers,

Mark