Re: Question of the status of GCJ

["Mike Purdy" <purdymi at binghamtonschools dot org>]

Thank you all for your information.  

So, if I understand the summary of this.. although effort has shifted
to OpenJDK, gcj is still viable and potentially a good performing
solution if our code is generally 1.5 code.  Further, current gcj
native-compile functionality will not break in the future, so a project
built with gcj in its build stream will be ok for a while to come. (?)

Mike



>>> Mark Wielaard <mark@klomp.org> 2/18/2009 4:05 AM >>>
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


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