Compiling and running Eclipse 3

[Tom Tromey <tromey at redhat dot com>]

Today Andrew said that I hadn't made our current status vis a vis
Eclipse clear enough, so here goes.

With the current BC compiler it is now official easy to pre-compile
Eclipse 3.  In my testing it seems to be fairly robust as well, though
I haven't really done anything extensive (just stuff like check out
classpath and build it).

No Eclipse changes are needed.  A similar procedure should work for
many applications.


Here is how you can do this yourself.

* Build the BC compiler

* Build rhug with the BC compiler.  This takes a while.  We need
  xalan and its dependencies; you can run with them interpreted if
  you like (so you can just download them if you want).

* Make a new database:

  database=/somewhere/eclipse.db
  jv-dbtool -n $database 80000

* Compile each Eclipse .jar file with something like this:

  gcj -fnew-verifier -fPIC -fjni -findirect-dispatch -shared \
    -o $name.so $name
  jv-dbtool -a $database $name $name.so

  I put all my .so files into one big directory, though that is kind
  of a pain since then you have to deal with jars with duplicate
  basenames.  You can put the .so files anywhere, though, so I would
  suggest putting them next to their .jar files.  The names of the
  .so files are not relevant, so you could also just number them.

  Compiling will take a while, especially the bigger files like
  jdt.jar.

* Put the rhug and gcj library directories into your LD_LIBRARY_PATH,
  then run eclipse:

    LD_PRELOAD=$RHUG/lib/lib-org-apache-xalan.so \
    eclipse -vm gij \
       -vmargs \
       -Dorg.eclipse.core.runtime.ignoreLockFile=true \
       -Dgnu.gcj.runtime.VMClassLoader.library_control=never \
       -Dgnu.gcj.precompiled.db.path=$database

Tom