object serialization

[Jeff Sturm]

Warren Levy wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 21 Jun 1999, Tom Tromey wrote:
> 
> > >>>>> "Jeff" == Jeff Sturm <jsturm@sigma6.com> writes:
> >
> > Jeff> Who is working on object serialization (java.io.Object* classes)
> > Jeff> for libgcj?
> >
> > I don't think anybody is working on them right now.
> 
> I'm not working on them right now but I should be dealing with them in
> the coming months.  Please keep in touch so we don't cover the same ground.

OK.  Currently I have all stubs written (I can compile with them) and
I'm working through the thorny details of TC_CLASSDESC... unfortunately
the object serialization spec from Sun doesn't quite match the behavior
of 1.1, so I had to resort to running some tests under the JDK and doing
a little guesswork.

I underestimated the difficulty of a clean-room implementation... there
are a lot of subtleties in object serialization.  For example,
Serializable objects must be created by readObject() without invoking
any constructor. (Externalizable objects on the other hand must have a
public default constructor).  I haven't yet looked closely at CNI to see
if this is possible with documented calls.

I hope that by the end of this week I can read/write Externalizable
objects.  Serializable will follow... I need some native code to make it
work.

-- 
Jeff Sturm
jsturm@sigma6.com