Re: FYI: Updated "Building GCJ for Windows"

[Andrew Haley <aph at redhat dot com>]

Marco Trudel writes:
 > 
 > >  > - reflection (Class.forName(...)) is broken
 > >  > Classes won't be found be Class.forName() (thus throwing an 
 > >  > ClassNotFoundException).
 > >  > Any Ideas? I once read something in the archives, but I'm really unable 
 > >  > to find it again... I hope there's a solution for this.
 > >  > 
 > >  > - serialisation seems to be broken too
 > >  > Writing to files works, loading again fails with (if I remember right) 
 > >  > ClassNotFoundExceptions... Might be because of the reflection problem. 
 > >  > my solution was to write good old ordinary config files
 > >  > 
 > >  > - stacktraces are unusuable
 > >  > Whats the state? I'm relatively new to this list and it seems to be an 
 > >  > old problem. Something like dwarf would be better than sjil exceptions 
 > >  > but don't works on windows or would need a big deal to implement; 
 > >  > there's no active windows maintainer so this keeps open? Am I more or 
 > >  > less in the picture?
 > > 
 > > All of these bugs are symptoms of a common problem: stack traces
 > > don't work.
 > > 
 > > The only reasonable way to solve this on Windows is to make DWARF
 > > unwinding work and to write code to allow us to unwind through
 > > frames in DLLs.  We need the latter because sometimes
 > > gcc-compiled code is called as a Windows callback, and it may
 > > throw exceptions that require it to unwind through the DLL.
 > > 
 > > As far as I'm aware fixing this is tricky but not heroically
 > > difficult.
 > 
 > But it would definitely be heroic to do it (because there seems no
 > one to be interested in it). In my opinion, this is something that
 > definitely has to be done, so that gcj doesn't end up as a project
 > for a couple of linux hackers...

Well, gcj is the GNU Compiler for the Java(TM) Programming Language,
so you'd expect primary development to be on the GNU platform.

 > Who has the knowledge to do this?

Me.  One or two other gcj developers, and certainly a few Win/gcc
developers.

 > Would a donation to the project or to the implementer maybe incite
 > someone?

I don't know.  What is really needed is someone who has sufficient
need of gcj on Windows to spend the time fixing it.

Andrew.