Re: Up-to-date News on GCJ

[Andrew Haley <aph at redhat dot com>]

Andi Vajda writes:
 > 
 > On Thu, 1 Jun 2006, Bryce McKinlay wrote:
 > 
 > > Gerald Pfeifer wrote:
 > >> Does GCJ really have different PR needs?  Frankly, I'd like to give
 > >> GCJ much more presence in terms on the GCC side, and ramp of GCC PR
 > >> quite a bit.  I don't necessarily think the needs are so different,
 > >> rather that GCJ may be doing better. :-)
 > >
 > > IMO we do have - somewhat - different PR needs. For one thing,
 > > our audience is different - we're reaching out to Java developers
 > > who may not necessarily have any interest in C/C++ or the rest of
 > > the compiler suite. Also, GCJ can be seen as a collection of
 > > technologies of which the compiler is just one part. That isn't
 > > to say the pages should be separate, but it would be confusing if
 > > (for example) too much non-Java information were to be seen on
 > > the GCJ pages. I'd like to see GCJ maintain (and grow) its own
 > > web identity alongside GCC.
 > 
 > There are two things that make gcj+libgcj unique:
 > 
 >   1. Political: gcj+libgcj are a truly free java platform
 >   2. Technical: gcj+libgcj break java's insularity by allowing java modules to
 >                 be embedded in non-java processes via CNI
 > 
 > This second aspect is apparently often overlooked and is of
 > importance to the "usual" gcc audience. Java-only programmers
 > sitting on their java island probably couldn't care less but to the
 > rest of the programming world, gcj+libgcj are a truly unique set of
 > technologies worth being advertised.

I agree.  Also, because gcj uses "standard" system components such as
the linker and uses standard file formats, it works with standard
system tools.  This means that profiling, for example, can be done on
a system-wide basis with oprofile.  It means that programs written in
the Java language can be debugged with standard system debuggers.  And
so on.

In a way this is a technical point, but it's a political one too:
rather than re-implement everything ourselves, we work with the rest
of the community.

Andrew.