Re: [BC ABI] gcj-abi-2-dev-branch created

[Andrew Haley <aph at redhat dot com>]

Bryce McKinlay writes:
 > Andrew Haley wrote:
 > 
 > >Much remains to be done.  Some of the important missing things are:
 > >
 > >* The compiler must output assertions so that at runtime incompatible
 > >  class changes are detected.  At the moment it just emits warnings to
 >
 > I'm not sure what you mean by this. The runtime should be able to detect 
 > incompatible class changes automatically. I don't forsee any additional 
 > compiler output, besides the usual class metadata, will be needed.

We need to output assertions so that we detect when an incompatible
change has occurred.

For example, say we call a method with type T.  We need to make sure
that whatever we pass to that method really is compatible with T.  

Like this

   Foo f = new Bar();

is legal because Bar extends (or implements) Foo.  But if at runtime
Bar no longer implements Foo, we have to signal an error.

 > >* We need to fix mangling so we can use generics.
 > >  
 > >
 > This one should probably be in the "beyond 3.5" category. It will be a 
 > little while before we have to worry about generics.

I disagree.  generics will be in bytecode files Real Soon Now.

Andrew.