Hi,
I recently used gcj and gij for the first time and am very interested
in this project. However I find it very difficult to use it in eclipse
(and probably any other IDE) as a Standard-VM. It's required to
compile gcc and make various changes to get it working. I'm still
having problems, but this is not the topic of this thread.
Red Hat 8/9 provided a package gck-jdk or something similar, which emulated the
standard java2 sdk command-line tools but using gcj. It was used to compile
OpenOffice and was dropped when 1.1 dropped this dependency on its build
system. You can look for the packages at rpmfind.net and get the sources, to
recompile or repackage for Debian.
But this won't make gcj compatible with IDEs like Eclipse. GCJ doesn't
implements JPDA, for instance, and provides a different set of bootstrap
libraries (rt.jar x libgcj.jar). You'd have to implement a lot of Eclipe
plug-ins, maybe mixing with the gcc/gdb support from the Eclipse CDT, to make
it work seamless using gcj. Even red hat native eclipse builds can't use gcj as
the default java compiler, and they need to use a stadard java2 sdk for debugging.
Using other free software or proprietary java IDEs is out of question, as they
need swing. But you can setup a nice working environment using generic
programming editors like SciTE and Moleskine and debuggers like ddd and gvd.