RE: Announcement: micro-libgcj

[Joel Dice <dicej at mailsnare dot net>]

On Fri, 6 Jan 2006, Boehm, Hans wrote:

> It seems to me that this will make the implementation far less useful as
> a vehicle for running existing Java code, or code you also want to run
> on other implementations.  There is lots of code out there that uses
> arbitrary Objects for synchronization, e.g. by explicitly allocating a
> lock with "new Object()".  And I think code that now synchronizes on
> something like strings would need significant changes.  If I got to
> redesign the language, I might agree with you, at least with respect to
> synchronization.  But the cost of such a redesign, in terms of broken
> client code, strikes me as huge.

Please note that micro-libgcj is not meant to provide Java or a subset 
thereof, but rather a lightweight, streamlined alternative to Java. 
Wherever compatibility and simplicity have conflicted, I've chosen the 
latter.

Still, there's no reason we can't all have what we want.  I'm happy to add 
support for Java-compatible synchronization as a build option.  This would 
be any easy task to perform while merging with the GCC tree.  Same goes 
for anything else that I've "broken" with respect to Java.  With the right 
pre-processor magic, we can all be happy :).

 - Joel