Stallman lamenting that GCJ and ClassPath are still (read: eternally) catching up ...

[Alan Eliasen]

Cedric Berger wrote:
> it is always possible to play with new features by compiling to class using
> Sun's javac, and use gcj from there.

   This isn't really true, as we've discussed here before.  If you used
generics in your code, gcj will refuse to compile that bytecode because gcj
doesn't allow two methods in bytecode with the same signature but two
different return types.  That's what the generic compiler turns generic
methods into.

   For example, I'd love to be able to compile my "Frink" bytecode (
http://futureboy.homeip.net/frinkdocs/ ) to an executable using gcj (say, to
link with the gmp libraries for fast numeric calculations,) but I can't.

   This was discussed in the thread:
http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/java/2003-10/msg00115.html

   This issue is being tracked in bug 9861 and others.  The name-mangling will
have to change in gcj if we ever want to compile bytecode that was compiled
with a generic compiler.

   Has there been any progress on this issue?  I'd love to try and produce an
executable with gcj.

-- 
  Alan Eliasen                 | "You cannot reason a person out of a
  eliasen@mindspring.com       |  position he did not reason himself
  http://futureboy.homeip.net/ |  into in the first place."
                               |     --Jonathan Swift