Mark J. Wielaard

GCC 4.1 released

GCC 4.1 was finally released today. The gcj support is based on a slightly older GNU Classpath snapshot but it does include some really cool changes, new features, and fixes. You can read some more about it in an article I wrote a while ago on the GCJ part. “A look at GCJ 4.1“.

I am looking for similar overviews for the other parts of the GNU Compiler Collection. Dear lazyweb, please let me know if there are some high-level articles on the 4.1 changes in the general optimizer, c, c++, fortran, ada, objective-c[++] frontends, and new target support. There is so much going on around GCC that it is hard to keep up.

back

Back from Fosdem plus GNU Classpath and Friends meeting. It was a great event! Really tired now :) Some presentation slides on JFreeChart, Cairo, Free Swing and vmgen are now available.

The Fedora documentation team has been asking for Free FOP (Formatting Objects Processor – XSL-FO to PDF converter) and Thomas Fitzsimmons delivers. The result is still a bit boring since images are missing in the produced PDF file. But it can already be used to format 100+ page documents.

GNU Classpath and Friends – Get ready for Fosdem!

Super excited about Fosdem next weekend. There will be lots of cool talks and demos and it will be so nice to meet all the hackers. If you are coming please check out the practical info about the developer room. And if possible come to the Friday night meeting to have a beer together.

With all the excitement about Free Swing you would almost forget about our AWT implementation(s). Got some nice progress with our AWT gtk+ peers:

Lillian is also working on some AWT issues now. But there are still lots of hairy corner cases to get right. It is good to see some progress here since Michael is hacking on gcjwebplugin again and lots of applets still use AWT.

A look at GCJ 4.1

LWN published A look at GCJ 4.1 (and beyond). It seems there will be a GCC 4.1 RC1 release soon so everybody can try it out. (update: no rc1 yet, hopefully over the weekend.)

Although the article didn’t discuss any speed improvements (it is mainly about the progress of the standard core library) there are some comments to the article pointing out different benchmarks. There were also some interesting threads about performance on the gcj mailing list. Some reports claim native-complied GCJ modules are almost always about 30-40% faster than other implementations (at least on real world code). Others have micro-benchmarks that show that there are cases where gcj isn’t as fast at all. But in the end you have to be careful about what you benchmark, or GCJ will just optimize away all non-used code :)

GNU Classpath and Friends @ Fosdem 2006

The full GNU Classpath and Friends schedule has been published. And there is a Wiki page for coordinating all events around the meeting at http://developer.classpath.org/mediation/Fosdem2006.

Please add yourself if you will participate in the event or want to show a cool application running on the free stack during the Show your App/Hack your App session.

Like every couple of months David Gilbert made some charts to show our progress (the usual disclaimers about meaningless statistics apply!). I am especially excited how much progress our Mauve test-suite is making. It shows how serious we are are about the three Cs: Completeness, Correctness and Compatibility.

The Mauve report has been generated using JamVM, GNU Classpath, StatCVS, Cairo, the cairo-java bindings and a little bit of custom code. David will give a talk on “Putting the ‘Free’ into JFreeChart”, during the GNU Classpath and Friends Fosdem meeting in Brussels end of this month.

Dalibor, Fernando and I had submitted a talk idea for JavaOne, but it got rejected. I have never been to JavaOne and it would have been nice to talk a bit about our compatibility goal there and how to deploy in a Free Software environment. Many people want to deploy and get their programs written in the java programming language included in the major GNU/Linux distros. What we had wanted to present is how you reach millions of users taking some large packages that are now included with Debian, Fedora and Ubuntu as examples (Eclipse, Jonas, OpenOffice.org, etc). And explain what is possible now, what are the guidelines to follow when you want this for your own project/product, what will be possible in the future, how to check for compatibility, and which extra integration (like the gcj cross compiling to embedded devices or the .net mono bridge) you get for free. etc. Maybe next year.