java bytecode considered bad

[dewar@gnat.com]

The idea of having GCC generate JBC as output is dubious technically in
any case, since it is just at the wrong level. It is not clear to me
that this is really a useful approach technically. Certainly we rejected
this approach for our JGNAT product (and instead write a separate backend
that generates JBC) for technical reasons, not because of proprietary
backend generation concerns.

So in fact I think that a GCC that generated JBC would generate such
awful JBC for most languages that it would indeed be compeltely useless
as an intermediate language for other backends. The issue, which is
far from clear, is whether it would be useful for any significant other
purpose.