Last week I didn't find the time to write this summary, so this week's posting covers both weeks. It was two busy weeks on harmony-dev (I have 183 emails marked in my inbox), with a code contribution from IBM this week: "The code comprises a concrete implementation of the interface between virtual machine and class library that we have been discussing recently, together with a set of core Java classes". The contribution can be found under http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HARMONY-14 in JIRA. In a reply to the mailing list announcement of this contribution Geir Magnusson Jr. made some comments which are also interesting to read. Mark Wielaard then asked for a way to make it possible to include this contribution in GNU Classpath too. Jean-frederic Clere had a problem compiling it under SuSE 8.1, Tim Ellison and George Harley helped him. [http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-harmony-dev/200511.mbox/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
David N. Welton started a thread called "half-baked idea? j2me" where he suggested starting with implementing J2ME instead of J2SE because it could be easier to implement. There was some discussion indicating that this is not as easy as it seems first. Rodrigo Kumpera mentioned that "IKVM, sablevm and jamvm all run on portable devices". Archie Cobbs made an interesting point in this thread: He asked what the ideal language to write a JVM implementation with would look like. He then meant that Java would be pretty close to that when you extend it so you would be able to do some C-like stuff too. Robin Garner answered that "This is exactly how we see the dialect of Java that MMTk is written in". [http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-harmony-dev/200510.mbox/[EMAIL PROTECTED] In "[modularity] OSGi or ?", Geir Magnusson Jr., Mark Wielaard, Tim Ellison and Dalibor Topic where discussing about ways to achieve componentization. Mark explained that in GNU Classpath people "solve it for their own platform separately". Tim posted a link to an earlier thread where class library componentization was discussed. Dalibor did something like that in Kaffe but "found the manual updating of component sets during the rush of development on GNU Classpath to be, ugh, somewhat boring work". [http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-harmony-dev/200511.mbox/[EMAIL PROTECTED] George Harley started the thread "Implementation comparisons" with an email where he asks for "pinions on measuring how "correct" a new implementation of a J2SE class is". The discussion after that was partly about problems you could have (i.e. when the reference implementation by Sun behaves not like required by the Spec. or when the Spec is incomplete). The other part of the discussion was where to get the right specification. While the Javadoc and other documents are the Spec, some people mentioned that you should "always work from real books and not just the javadoc that IBM and Sun publish publicly describing the core library" (and of course problems with that where also discussed). [http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-harmony-dev/200511.mbox/[EMAIL PROTECTED] Enrico Migliore described some problems he still had when "compiling bootJVM with MSVC". Most of this discussion was about compiler issues, but I think the interesting part of the discussion started when Enrico Migliore provided a link to a pthread implementation for WIN32. This implementation is available under the LGPL and "compatibility issues between the LGPL and Apache licenses are still unresolved". Apache is working on that issue (it will be discussed at the ApacheCon), but for now we should not have dependencies on LGPL libraries. Tim Ellison mentioned that in IBMs contribution (which is not yet accepted for the sandbox) there is be a threading implementation which will (hopefully) be part of the harmony project soon. Enrico finally made it: "bootJVM compiled with MSVC". [http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-harmony-dev/200511.mbox/[EMAIL PROTECTED] [http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-harmony-dev/200511.mbox/[EMAIL PROTECTED] Geir Magnusson Jr. started "VM/Class Library Interface (or "Storming the Gates! Take 3!")" with an email where he explains what he expects from such an interface and that it would be time to define it now. Dan Lydick explained where BootJVM is now and how he wants to solve this interface. Archie Cobbs works with "a completely 'stock' unmodified version of Classpath" in jchevm now. Leo Simons explained how to work with a centralized version control system like SVN (which we use here) in this thread (commit often, how to write commit comments, ...). There was lots of details of the interface discussed in this thread, I think everyone who is interested can read this in the mailing list archive. [http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-harmony-dev/200511.mbox/[EMAIL PROTECTED] In the thread "[arch] Interpreter vs. JIT for Harmony VM" Steve Shih-wei Liao explained in some detail the requirements for an interface between the VM and the Execution Engine which supports both interpreters and JITs. He wrote it "according to the 4 areas in the previous email: abstracting over the mode of execution, asynchronous compilation, reentrancy, and supporting the mixing of JIT and interpreter". [http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-harmony-dev/200511.mbox/[EMAIL PROTECTED] In other threads... Jean-frederic Clere and Dan Lydick discussed about some configuration issues of BootJVM in "[BootJVM] configure". Archie Cobbs and Tim Ellison where talking about some finalization issues in "Some questions about the architecture". Archie Cobbs (who contributed jchevm [which is not called ArchieVM :( ]) is our newes Apache Harmony committer. Leo Simons wrote "The Unofficial "Harmony, Licensing, the Universe and everything" FAQ" where he answeres several questions which have always been around on the list. Mark Wielaard wrote some interesting comments here. Leo Simons wrote about "Harmony @ Apachecon US 2005". Dan Lydick sent in a status info for BootJVM in a mail called "Current changes to bootJVM source base". Mark Wielaard announced "ANN: GNU Classpath "95% and counting" 0.19 released". [http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-harmony-dev/200510.mbox/[EMAIL PROTECTED] [http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-harmony-dev/200510.mbox/[EMAIL PROTECTED] [http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-harmony-dev/200511.mbox/[EMAIL PROTECTED] [http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-harmony-dev/200511.mbox/[EMAIL PROTECTED] [http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-harmony-dev/200511.mbox/[EMAIL PROTECTED] [http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-harmony-dev/200511.mbox/[EMAIL PROTECTED] [http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-harmony-dev/200511.mbox/[EMAIL PROTECTED] <p>BTW: You might have noticed that I didn't list all people involved in the discussions this week. I'm not sure if this is really nessessary, but I'd really appreciate feedback about this. Would you want to be listed here when you've been involved in a discussion, or is it enough when I only mention some people which wrote important postings? Regards, David. -- Read the archive of this series at http://deltalabs.at/ -- RSS feed: http://deltalabs.at/?q=taxonomy/term/8/0/feed -- Also aggregated at: http://planet.classpath.org/ -- David Tanzer, Haghofstr. 29, A-3352 St. Peter/Au, Austria/Europe http://deltalabs.at -- http://dev.guglhupf.net -- http://guglhupf.net My PGP Public Key: http://guglhupf.net/david/david.asc -- Pavlov's Mice Episode: Brain: Are you thinking what I'm thinking, Pinky? Pinky: Uh... yeah, Brain, but where are we going to find rubber pants our size?
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