Paul Fisher wrote:
> The FSF and Cygnus have agreed, in principle, to merge the libgcj and
> Classpath projects together.
>
> The general framework:
>
> 1. libgcj and Classpath will both change licensing terms to the GPL
> with the following exception:
>
> /* As a special exception, if you link this library with other files
> to produce an executable, this library does not by itself cause
> the resulting executable to be covered by the GNU General Public
> License. This exception does not however invalidate any other
> reasons why the executable file might be covered by the GNU
> General Public License. */
>
Fine.
>
> 2. Cygnus will assign all of the libgcj code it owns to the Free
> Software Foundation. All future contributions will be assigned to
> the Free Software Foundation.
>
Great.
>
> 3. libgcj, which includes an execution environment for programs
> written in the Java programming language, will likely be merged
> into GCC proper.
>
I am getting goosebumps. I am look forward to getting really great java
performance.
>
>
> Help merging our projects together will be greatly appreciated. We
> need to address overlapping classes and make sure that only the best
> portions of our class libraries exist in the merged distribution.
>
We will need to go through the differences. Probably, go package by
package and hand off the tasks to maintainers and volunteers. The classes
will have to be evaluated on many levels such as cleaness, effciency, and
speed. Also, the differences in native implementation language and CNI vs
JNI may make a difference. They generally have a lot less in terms of
clases then we do but can fill in some holes for us.
libgcj has java.util.zip and java.util.zip along with DecimalFormat, and
Event that we need at the momemt. java.io, java.lang , and java.net is
there for the most part as far as I can tell. Some java.text and
java.util is there also. java.security is almost non existent along with
java.sql, java.rmi, java.applet, and java.beans. libgcj's java.awt is in
a partially implemented state. Finally, a lot of their native code is
written in C++ and I think CNI ( I do not care but others may).
Also, if to get started on merging the projects some guidelines should be
setup. Where to get libgcj, what compiler to get if you want to test
integration of things, etc. I am also curious can their compiler compile
Classpath?
BTW: libgcj http://sourceware.cygnus.com/java/
CVS: for libgcj
cvs -d:pserver:[EMAIL PROTECTED]:/cvs/java login
(password is ``anoncvs'')
cvs -z9 -d:pserver:[EMAIL PROTECTED]:/cvs/java co libgcj
(Note: their CVS server is a lot faster then ours )
Mark Benvenuto
