Reconsidering gcjx

[Tom Tromey]

>>>>> "Adam" == Adam Megacz <megacz@cs.berkeley.edu> writes:

>> I think our technical approach should be to have ecj emit class files,
>> which would then be compiled by jc1.  In particular I think we could
>> change ecj to emit a single .jar file. 

Adam> I (and David Crawshaw) have actually done this.
Adam>   http://tool.ibex.org/

Nice!

Last night I modified the eclipse compiler to emit a zip file and also
to use GNU-style error formatting.  I also went through the other gcj
options to see what would require upstream changes.

The big thing seems to be handling the -M family of options.

There are also little impedance mismatches, like translating gcc's -W
options to the style ecj wants; or handling -I.  There are different
ways to approach these kinds of problems, though; e.g. we could write
a custom argument translating program, or we could somehow wedge it
into the gcj driver.


While investigating I realized that we would also lose a small
optimization related to String "+" operations.  When translating from
.java we currently use a non-synchronizing variant of StringBuffer to
do this.

There are a couple possible fixes for this.

Tom