Re: Question of the status of GCJ

[Bryce McKinlay <bryce at mckinlay dot net dot nz>]

On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 7:36 PM, Andrew Haley <aph@redhat.com> wrote:
>
> Marco Trudel wrote:
> > Andrew Haley wrote:
> >> Mike Purdy wrote:
> >>> Thank you Andrew.
> >>> This is interesting.  Does the OpenJDK allow native compilation?
> >>
> >> No.
> >
> > But it would be possible with (relatively) less work.
>
> Relative to writing the whole thing again, maybe, but still hard.
>
> I'd love to find an excuse to do it.  gcj is still a very high-
> performance implementation of the Java language.

Such a merge could proceed gradually, along similar lines to the
original Classpath-GCJ merge. It would be a lot of work to merge all
the way down to java.lang, but higher level packages, such as
AWT/Swing, should be able to plug in relatively painlessly and provide
a lot of benefit.

I guess the major stumbling block is persuading the FSF and/or
Steering committee to allow the OpenJDK code in the GCC repository -
otherwise this work would have to proceed in a forked tree.

Bryce