Re: GNU Classpath and JVMs

[Christian Thalinger]

On Thu, 2005-09-15 at 16:51 +0200, Dalibor Topic wrote:
> Yes. That's part of the necessity of being a work-in-progress, though: 
> the VM interface is still in huge flux, and will be until GNU Classpath 
> is finished. Since GNU Classpath is fortunately not tied to a single 
> runtime, the VM interface is regularly improved upon to fix design 
> decisions that cause problems on one runtime or another.
> 
> That obviously puts a price on some design decisions by the runtime 
> developers: if they maintain their own copy of GNU Classpath, then they 
> miss out on the latest features, but nothing breaks ;) If they go with 
> CVS head, then they need to keep their VM up with the changes in the VM 
> interface in close step. The simplest solution, afaict, is to go with 
> the tested releases of GNU Classpath, and update your VM interface 
> accordingly. That's what CACAO and JikesRVM do, afaik.

Exactly.  If the VM interface does not change (or only minor changes),
you can configure CACAO to use a external classpath installation (which
can be a CVS version or a newly realeased one), like it's done for
jamvm.  Just use the --with-external-classpath=<cir> configure switch.

TWISTI