Re: GCJ adoption and improving our "PR"

[Andrew Haley <aph at redhat dot com>]

Kevin B. Hendricks writes:
 > Hi Andrew,
 > 
 > > That is the focus of the "New ABI" that we keep talking about.
 > 
 > When (which version) would we expect that to appear (gcc 3.5 or later?)

That's the plan.

 > > It'll be possible to run existing jarfiles without altering them,
 > > although you'll probably want to do a precompilation step to make
 > > running faster.
 > 
 > I really don't mind recompiling them all especially if I can go direct 
 > to native.
 > 
 > The issue I was trying to bring up is how high the hurdle is now to 
 > simply get something useable going.

Indeed.  We care very much about this.

 > > There's still the issue of getting free versions of all the libraries,
 > > of course.
 > 
 > Yes, we seem to have so many license variations that nothing "free" 
 > works with anything else "free" and by doing so we are making work for 
 > ourselves and forcing the reinvention of the wheel (how many awt and 
 > peer related implmentations do we really need!).

I haven't come across that as a huge problem: GPL + exception seems to
be OK with the licences of other free Java libraries.

Andrew.