＞It could even be that a Harmony VM would be
＞incorporated with Sun's classlibraries to create a product by some
＞comercial vendor that could lawfully do that. In this view, it would be
＞important to have a VM-library interface that could accomplish that.
If people really want to do that, then they will have the $$$ to have it
done.
As far as I am concerned, what interests me in Harmony is to have a really
free good Java 5 VM embeddable everywhere (including FreeDSB, OpenBSD and
others, as well as embedded devices for instance) with a good support for
real-time and number crunching too (which means it will scale well for
distributed applications/multimedia-DBs and all those fancy things to come
in the near future).
The very first step: having support for java 5 as-in-the-available-standards
(i.e. something usable to something for some people, and also something to
play with so that people can build reasonable real-life test suites on top
of it - because I only trust what I see) is already a good bunch of work.
The next step: having good support (read performance) for multimedia(number
crunching)/realtime for instance, or some set of applications that really
matter[1] & so is probably more fun and cooler than just trying to follow
fuzzy, obscure, dark-side implementation choices (and what about plagiarism
charges in courts?), without just considering the efforts it would take to
do it. Besides, having to follow crap specs (inexistent specs) is the best
way to have a product that has a plethora of security holes & other funny
bugs IMHO.
Regards,
RB
[1] And all kinds of advanced GC techniques & JIT technologies as exposed by
the specialists of these fields that are in this group. What I mean here is
that there is probably some concrete target application set to focus on at
the beginning (say the kind of stuffs that are priorities to micro$oft and
apple/intel etc.), no more, no less.
-----Original Message-----
From: Bruno F. Souza [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Wednesday, June 08, 2005 2:31 AM
To: harmony-dev@incubator.apache.org
Subject: Re: The Classpath VM interface. (Please read)
Sven de Marothy wrote:
>
> I really don't view it that way. I view it as 'Is it worth spending
> effort on this?'.
>
I understand where Geir is coming from here: even more important then
the implementation, one of Harmony objectives is to involve different
groups as well as commercial companies, to define a modular architecture
for a J2SE implementation. It could even be that a Harmony VM would be
incorporated with Sun's classlibraries to create a product by some
comercial vendor that could lawfully do that. In this view, it would be
important to have a VM-library interface that could accomplish that.
But I mostly agree with Sven: if we're going to support plugging
different libraries, we must start from somewere that is available and
documented (Classpath has such a beast) and then work with the
interested parties to expand that. For us to include the existing (non
documented/proprietary) Sun interface it would have to be contributed by
Sun into the discussion.
This could be a good way of starting to propose a Sun involvement. If
this proves a good idea it could even turn into a JCP spec as it was
suggested. If Sun is not interested, I don't see any reason to invest
effort in doing it, since it will have no pratical value.
I think it is more probable that IBM or other Sun licensee that wants to
use Sun's class libraries will just do the effort in order for then to
use the existing library, and if legally possble, contribute that back.
Without Sun's involvement, that's the best we could hope for.
And if we want a pluggable infrastructure, we would still be better off
starting from Classpath, since it already plugs into many VMs, while
Sun's library seams to not have this advantage to start with. Better
change one than many :-)
Bruno.
> /Sven
>
--
Bruno.
______________________________________________________________________
Bruno Peres Ferreira de Souza Brazil's JavaMan
http://www.javaman.com.br bruno at javaman.com.br
if I fail, if I succeed, at least I live as I believe
