Re: Which library implementation to use/work on?

[Andrew Hughes <ahughes at redhat dot com>]

----- Original Message -----
> Hi there,
> 
> I'm investigating GCJ for a project of mine to open up a Java library
> to the world of [Objective] C++ via the quite lovely CNI interface.
> 
> My project depends on the Google protocol buffers library. Attempting
> to compile this jar reveals that there is a slight gap in
> java.util.regex in GNU Classpath.
> 

Can you provide details please?

> I'm trying to figure out what I should do with my time:
> 
> 1) Write a patch to classpath - problem, project appears to be dead?

Hardly:

http://icedtea.classpath.org/mirror/git/classpath/classpath/ (commits 6 days ago)
http://developer.classpath.org/pipermail/classpath/2012-March/thread.html (active discussion)

How is this dead?  There's less than there was, yes, but that's because Sun (now Oracle)
have largely succeeded in persuading people to switch to their less-open OpenJDK project.
We always had problems generating interest before OpenJDK (quite a lot of people seemed happy
to put up with the proprietary but gratis JDK downloads from Sun).  Having a more complete
open source project is obviously going to sway those who want a full JDK now (notably distros), but
there will be those still interested in the intellectual challenge of producing a JDK themselves.
I think there are clear issues with having a single implementation of a platform; it leads to
confusion between what is part of the specification and what is merely an artefact of implementation,
an issue we've hit many times in developing GNU Classpath.

> 2) Try and somehow compile against Apache Harmony - problem, project
> also appears to be dead?

I can't comment much on Harmony, but it always seemed to have less of a user-driven community than
Classpath to begin with and has officially been put in the 'attic' as far as I'm aware.

> 3) Change the protobufs library so it avoids the stubs in Classpath
> 
> It seems that trying to support GCJ will keep my project at the level
> of Java 1.5 (or 1.4?) forever, as it's no longer being developed,
> which is a shame.
> 

It would help if you did a little research before making such claims.

> I recall that some time ago Sun open sourced Java, but I don't know
> if
> it's compatible with what I want to do or how it plays together with
> GCJ (if at all).
> 

Depends on what you want to do.  It doesn't have CNI.

> Any tips for what I should do?
> 
> thanks
> -mike
> 

-- 
Andrew :)

Free Java Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc. (http://www.redhat.com)

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