Re: How mature are the Free Software efforts on Java?

[Brian Jones]

Norbert Bollow <address@hidden> writes:

> Brian Jones <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> > This is okay, I will concentrate on getting VMs working that use
> > Classpath and testing the library.
> 
> Hi,
>   I've been lurking for a while but still haven't been able to
> figure out how mature the Free Software efforts on Java really
> are...  are the essential components mostly working?  Or do you
> need more volunteers?  I'm asking because I'm a member of the
> DotGNU Steering committee, and we decided several months ago
> that we want to support Java with equal priority as C#, but then
> we didn't really start looking into the Java side of things...
> (I'm trying to get this sin of omission corrected now.)

With the exception of the AWT, I would say the essential components
are mostly working.  There are things like cleaning up the JNI code to
check for exceptions more appropriately and the possibility of using
APR (Apache Portable Runtime) to make that code more portable to other
platforms without much effort.  A few places within the code base have
UNIX-isms that shouldn't be where they are.  I don't think the
SecurityManager is integrated into every method it is supposed to be.
It would be nice to support multi-language exception messages in both
Java and native code but that might be too much overhead.  I'm not
confident in our text/string/character implementation which is
different from what gcj uses... mostly because it seems to fail every
Mauve test.  Finally, there are not enough Mauve tests to make me say
it works well because a lot of functionality does not yet have a Mauve
test.  

That's the ugly side... the other side is that multiple VMs use some
form of Classpath and you can actually run some applications with it.
Contributing to Mauve is really easy and if you just barely know Java
you can still make valuable contributions there.

Brian
-- 
Brian Jones <address@hidden>