Announcement: micro-libgcj

[Boehm, Hans]

> From: Mike Emmel
> 
> On 1/6/06, Joel Dice <dicej@mailsnare.net> wrote:
...
> > It would be trivial to add a System.free(Object) function, allowing 
> > explicit memory management, if it was needed.
> >
> 
> What about stack allocation i.e a snew  or 
> System.stackAlloc(Foo.class) I'd think that would be useful 
> for these types of platforms.
>

I would have thought that a major reason for doing this would be to
develop small stand-alone type-safe (at least for the Java piece)
code.

Neither stack allocation nor explicit deallocation preserves
type-safety for the Java code, at least not in this simple form.

My impression is that the RTSJ people thought about this fairly
hard, and came up with a complex solution.  I don't know to what
extent it has been accepted by the community.  It appeasr to me
that a real-time collector is increasingly considered at least
a viable alternative.

In general, I agree that something like micro-libgcj is really needed.
Any chance of making the implemented subset match any of the
previously defined ones, e.g. some J2ME version?  (I ask this
without having seriously looked at J2ME.  But it seems to me that
there is a big advantage to well-defined subsets of the API,
since proliferation of subsets leads to nonportable
client code.)

Hans