Re: Stallman lamenting that GCJ and ClassPath are still (read: eternally) catching up ...

[Tom Tromey <tromey at redhat dot com>]

>>>>> "Dalibor" == Dalibor Topic <robilad@kaffe.org> writes:

Dalibor> I've seen quite a bit of interest in some projects in using features
Dalibor> from 1.5, like generics, in general, and with free runtimes in
Dalibor> particular, after the 1.5 preview was released.

Yeah.  Personally I see a lot of 1.5 as actually useful, I can
understand why people would want to start using it.  I'd like to see
the free community start work on it *now*, so that we have some chance
of only being 6 months behind instead of a year behind when 1.5 goes
final.

Dalibor> Anyway, I doubt that gcj, i.e. the compiler, is being really
Dalibor> held back by the efforts to catch up to the remaining JDK 1.4
Dalibor> library APIs.

In my opinion the major problems with gcj, the compiler, are (1) a
hard-to-understand implementation which in turn helps cause (2) a lack
of maintenance.  There are lots of front end bugs which have gone
unfixed for a long time; we haven't even filed them all (look at the
jacks failure rate... some of these are pedantic, but lots of them
aren't).

What I'd like to see is a real restructuring of the gcj front end, to
make it easier to understand and hack, and to make it easier to add
generics and other new features as they come along.  I've been working
on such a project in my spare time (it isn't near ready yet, etc, etc
-- contact me if you're interested).

I'd like to see gcj to end up as the standard free Java compiler that
is used by all the other projects, but we can only do this if we
drastically improve its quality (and remove limitations, e.g. we still
can't build kaffe with gcj) and also add the new language features as
they arrive.

Tom