GCJ/libgcj capabilities

[Matt Welsh]

Just look in the 'libjava' directory of libgcj and see what classes are
there. Most GUI stuff isn't there yet, that's true, but many of the other
classes are easy to add if they don't yet exist.

I think it's important to stress that there is a big difference between
Java and the many libraries which Java supports. Unfortunately, Sun's
promise of "write once, run everywhere" assumes much more than a JVM: 
you also need the full set of JDK libraries. Considering that new Java 
APIs come out every week, it's going to be impossible to track everything.

To make things worse, you can't simply run Sun's JDK classes on any old
JVM -- they assume that a bunch of native methods are also defined.
Since this native method requirement isn't defined by the JDK specs, 
you're effectively constrained to using Sun's JVMs if you want to use 
Sun's JDK libraries. Oh yes -- you could also reimplement all of those
native methods yourself, and make sure they behave exactly as Sun's do. 
Note that they're undocumented! 

Can you say "vendor lock-in", boys and girls? Oh, wait a minute -- I thought
Java was supposed to *eliminate* vendor lock-in? Boy am I confused.

Matt Welsh, UC Berkeley

"Daniel P. Zepeda" <dpz@pobox.com> writes:
> HI,
> 	I've perused the limited documentation available on the website.
> Is it up to date? I'm interested in using GCJ, and from what others have
> mentioned on other lists, it seemed to be a usable product. But from what
> I see on the website it is not ready for primetime development of
> applications. I can't tell from the list traffic I've seen what the state
> really is for it. Could someone give me a direct answer about current
> capabilities?  For instance, can I use AWT? Swing? JNI? all of the IO and
> util classes that I'm used to like StringTokenizer(), Random() etc? I've
> downloaded it onto a Mandake 6.0 + updates, kernel 2.2.12 machine. I
> successfully built GCJ, but have problems with libgcj. I want to know if
> it is going to be worth my time and trouble to get it all installed on my
> system. 
> 
>   --
> Daniel P. Zepeda
> dpz@pobox.com
> 
> "In complete darkness, we are all the same. Only our knowledge and wisdom 
> separates us there." -- J. Jackson