Re: Question of the status of GCJ

[Andrew Haley <aph at redhat dot com>]

Bryce McKinlay wrote:
> 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.

That's true.  I guess my problem is that I'm not very interested in all
that AWT/Swing stuff.  :-)

> 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.

I don't think that there is any need at all for the OpenJDK code to
be checked in to the GCC repository.  glibc is happily outside the
GCC repo, after all.  All the work could be done in the IcedTea
repository.

Andrew.