JamaicaVM and GNU Classpath

[Andy Walter]

Hello Classpath-Developers,

at aicas GmbH (http://www.aicas.com), we are developing a Java Virtual 
Machine, JamaicaVM, that comes with its own (clean room) implementation of 
the standard classes. Since this is redundant work (and, as I understand it, 
exactely the reason why the GNU Classpath project started), we are very 
interested in joining your project.

Our VM is currently "closed source" as well as commercial. As far as I 
understand the Classpath license agreement, this would not be a problem to 
you. I'd appreciate if we were welcome to join you and think that everybody 
could benefit.

The easiest way would be if we could get write access to the repository, so 
that we can provide code and bug fixes directly. (Of course, we intend to 
give something back Classpath). Providing the code to a maintainer would be 
okay for us, too.

In our developer branch, we replaced our own Java API (expect from java.lang 
and java.awt*) by GNU Classpath, to see whether there are any unexpected 
problems. The result looks quite good: We didn't encounter much problems and 
in Classpath, much more packages are implemented. The only disadvantage is, 
that with GNU Classpath, JamaicaVM needs more memory and seems to be somewhat 
slower. Since JamaicaVM is designed for realtime systems, which are typically 
rather small, embedded systems with weak CPUs, I would expect that we can 
provide optimizations here.

Another thing that might be interesting for you is that JamaicaVM is easily 
portable to a variously number of platforms. Currently, it is available on 
Linux, Solaris, VxWorks, QNX, embOS and Euros. We are working on a NetOS 
version and RTEMS is probably coming soon. Some of those systems are somewhat 
different from ordinary Unices. For the Classpath project, compatibility with 
those systems was obviously not an issue. Since we need to do this anyway, 
we'd volunteer to write a platform-independent layer for accessing the 
operating system. (If you don't like this for some reason, no problem. In 
that case, we would only use the Java code from a common repository and 
continue with our own native code).


What do you think? Are we welcome?


Kind regards from Karlsruhe,

        Andy.



* One thing that shouldn't be unmentioned: Unlike the rest of our current 
standard classes, the AWT implementation is not completely written by 
ourselves, but based on Acunia's Wonka/Rudolph.

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