Re: String/Hashtable boostrapping (again)

[Patrick Doyle]

On Tue, 17 Jul 2001, Etienne M. Gagnon wrote:

> I say this because you might have to face many other bootstrapping 
> problems in your VM.  For example, imagine that you wanted to support 
> class loading out of .jar files, but you wanted to do it using 
> java.util.zip classes (why rewrite the whole thing in C/C++, when you 
> can have nice and robust code for it written in Java?).  You really 
> don't want to bother the java.util.zip.* developers with your VM 
> initialization/class loading problems to make this possible, instead, 
> you want to handle these problems internally in you VM, keeping a nice 
> separation of concerns between the libraries and the VM (as much as is 
> possible).

But what's the point of having code in Classpath that can't be executed
properly?  Why is it there?

Besides, the point is moot now, because apparently this circular
dependency has been removed in CVS.  I was working from the older 0.02
snapshot.

> As I said in another message, handling bootstrapping issues is not 
> difficult.  Yes it requires some care, but it is easily achieved with a 
> special bootstrapping mode in your VM.  While in bootstrapping mode, you 
> can decide not to fullfill all of the Java/JVM semantics, for various 
> reasons.  One of such reasons is the impossibility to fullfill the 
> semantics, e.g.: during initialization, a "ClassFormatError" is detected 
> while parsing the "ClassFormatError.class" file...

Hmm, I see what you mean.  There are going to be lots of these issues.

> I hope this will help you with your VM design.

Yes, thanks very much.

--
Patrick Doyle
address@hidden