14 Dec 2002
GNU Crypto
GNU Crypto has fastly grown to a full blown crypto library for java. It is now also a java security provider. So we have been solving all the bugs in GNU Classpath that prevented security providers to work. And it seems we are now almost there. And GNU gcj produces really fast crypto code since it is able to do some nice optimizations when it compiles to native code as an ahead of time compiler. This really shows the power of gcj. Being build on top of the GCC: GNU Compiler Collection it can produce good code for a lot of processors (x86, mips, powerpc, alpha, ia64, s390, arm, etc.) It is not that hard to create a portable java bytecode interpreter that would run on all those platforms, but producing a fast interpreter for those platforms would be a lot of work. But when you compile to native code with gcj you get it for free!
If all goes well we will have a very nice and fast crypto addition to the GNU java platform next year.