[conspire] Re: Christian draws out a Sun Microsystems guy

[Dalibor Topic]

Rick Moen wrote:
> Quoting Dalibor Topic (robilad at kaffe.org):
> 
> [libgcj and kaffe:]
> 
> 
>>They are different projects, really. But they've been converging a bit in the
>>last years, due to the size of task, and the friendly anti-NIH nature of the
>>people involved. :)
> 
> 
> Hi, Dalibor!
> 

Hey, Rick! Nice to meet you!

> Yes, about the time I was writing that, I was guessing that whatever
> source I'd seen claiming that libgcj was a bundled copy of kaffee must
> have been in error.  I've replaced that wording[1] with a more-recent
> statement I saw somewhere on the GCJ site, that I hope is more accurate:
> It said that GCJ's JRE "was based on GNU Classpath, and modeled after
> the standard Sun Java classes".
> 
> If I'm still missing the boat, please do let me know.

Well, afaik, back in the old days, when the 90s were slowly limping 
towards their end, there used to be three mighty free software class 
libraries, for java runtimes: Kaffe's, GNU Classpath's and libgcj's. 
Yeah, a bit weird. Not unlike the Mono/portable .net/DotGNU mess, I guess.

Then after a while, some very bright people figured that uniting effort 
was the only way to get the huge job done in a reasonable time frame, so 
they started to merge libgcj and GNU Classpath together into quite a bit 
more than the sum of its parts. As more and more runtimes sprang up 
using GNU Classpath, one thing led to next, eventually with the revived 
Kaffe.org project starting to merge in GNU Classpath in late 2002 in 
order to replace its own class library with a collaboratively maintained 
class libraries project.

These days, GNU Classpath is the backbone of ~20 different free software 
runtimes, as diverse as IKVM and JCVM, or JikesRVM and gcj.

Gcj has become quite exciting, with the new binary compatibility ABI in 
4.0. It's a pretty nice foundation for distributions, and Fedora Core 4 
is using it quite extensively. Chances are Ubuntu will follow.

> [1] In http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Devtools/java.html

Nice page. Kaffe actually has two JIT engines, and had one since 1996, 
judging by the change logs. I wasn't part of it until early 2002, so I 
don't really have a clear picture of the early origins of either Kaffe 
or gcj.

Tom Tromey would be the one to ask everything on gcj, as he has been 
around since the early gcj days, I think. I've CC:ed him, so that 
Christian can grab his e-mail address and interview him :)

cheers,
dalibor topic