Ahead of time compiler solutions

[Philippe Laporte <plaporte at wgate dot com>]

Hi all,
          I've been doing some research and survey.

I am currently investigating precompiling the core class libraries to 
native for the (God forbid) SUN JDK. My purpose is that 20 or so 
Mozillas would run on the same system, each starting a JVM, but I would 
like to have a single copy of the core classes system-wide. As you all 
know the JVM text is loaded only once by the OS; I would like it to be 
the same for the core (statically available) classes.

How hard would it be to have gcj generate code for the SUN VM 1.4.1? I'm 
new to the topic, but is the idea of a bridge interface between VMs and 
Ahead of time compilers crazy? Is it conceivable?  
Coming back to the main task of ahead compilation, a good stategy, 
employed by at least both TurboJ and Carlos Pineda at the Polytechnic 
University of Catalunya, is to interface the JIT mechanism to the 
precompiled code.

I know it has been done with Kaffe, I've seen it running when I was at 
Transvirtual. BTW, has GCJ subsumed Kaffe and Classpath yet? It's a 
complete system now, right? Someone finish that AWT! :-) I guess 
legalities come into play once more. It's hard to imagine GCJ not 
outperforming the old Kaffe in all contexts...

Thanks a lot,
--

Philippe Laporte

Software Engineer

WorldGate 
3190 Tremont Avenue
Trevose PA 19053
Tel: 215-354-5389
Email: plaporte@wgate.com