Eclipse goes Native

LinuxJournal published the article ”Eclipse Goes Native” by John Healy, Andrew Haley and Tom Tromey:

Red Hat’s Eclipse Engineering team has freed the popular integrated development environment from its ties to a proprietary Java Virtual Machine.

To compile Eclipse natively, Red Hat’s Eclipse Engineering team used GCJ, a free, optimizing, ahead-of-time compiler for Java. GCJ can compile Java source code to native machine code, Java source code to Java bytecode and Java bytecode to native machine code. The approach we took involves using GCJ to compile Java bytecode to native machine code.

This article discusses why native compilation was an attractive choice; explains what we had to do to GCJ, libgcj and Eclipse to make it possible […]