Mark J. Wielaard

For a long time we have needed a clear way to explain what we have been doing, how we do it and what our goals and road map are. When I was in Brazil a few months back David Wheeler discussed our progress, development model and goals with Bruno, Dalibor and me. As an outsider to our development community he was able to give us a clear picture of what we were actually doing. He has a nice writeup of the whole event. We discussed how to put down how we Build, Test and Deliver everything. And I asked several people and groups for input. But it is hard to get consensus on what are the essential things. Especially because we really wanted to put it all down in just 2 pages so it could be used as a quick reference for new people. Or used as a flyer at conferences.

Recently I spoke to various people who were happily surprised that various things we helped with (in particular Eclipse 3, Tomcat 5, ant, etc.) just worked with their latest Ubuntu and Fedora Core installations just using Free Software. Their surprise made me realize that we have to do a better job of communicating what we have done and how we are delivering it. So I just updated the document that we started during FISL to our current status and road map. I didn’t get it down to 2 pages, but 3 pages isn’t bad for a start. I cannot thank David enough for his patience and SouJava for bringing us together. But all mistakes in the final document are mine. This is clearly a first release, so please send corrections, additions, better pictures, translations, etc.

There is now a PDF, OpenDocument and OpenOffice (sxw) version of the paper: Escaping the Java Trap: A practical road map to the Free Software and Open Source alternatives. I also tried to export it as XHTML, but the result was not very readable. Help converting the document to other formats is highly appreciated. (Update: Thanks to Baron Schwartz there is now also a nice clean HTML version.)

I hope this document can be a base for more specialized support and marketing documents for our efforts. So please feel free to adapt it to your own needs and audience.

Battle of the runtimes!

Seems that after the release of JamVM 1.4.0 a lot of projects thought it was time to do an updated release (most based on GNU Classpath 0.19):

• SableVM 1.13-pre1
• IKVM.NET 0.22 (includes generics branch)
• Cacao 0.93

And slashdot claims GCC 4.1 Released (grin, they are about 2 months early…) But I am sure that when it actually releases it will certainly rock!

It is nice to have so much choice. And most of these projects are really mature now. The use of really different execution engines (interpreter, byte-code transformation, jit, aot or some hybrid) is really facinating to watch.

Seems I am unable to sent out email about the mailing list troubles so I hope some of the classpath subscribers will read about it here…

Subject: Lots of email bounces/unsubscribes
Date: Thu, 24 Nov 2005 16:37:18 +0100

Hi,

I am seeing a lot of list traffic bounce and/or people being
unsubscribed because spamcop.net has lists.gnu.org in its RBL. If you
are (indirectly through your ISP) using spamcop you will probably not
receive this email. But I post it anyway for people reading the archives
after they have discovered their mail server has been blocking any
gnu.org emails.

I asked the savannah-hackers and gnu.org sysadmins to investigate but
till it has been resolved it would be good to not use the spamcop RBL.

Cheers,

Mark

Subject: savannah down (and list bounces again)
Date: Fri, 25 Nov 2005 01:23:19 +0100

Hi all,

Seems this is a day that everything breaks down :{
My original email about the spamcop rbl block seems to have never
reached the list, so here it is attached again. And now savannah is
down. Several people have been paged to get the system back up, but
apparently everybody capable of doing that is located in an area
observing thanksgiving. So no ETA about when it will be available again.

Sorry for the bad news.

Cheers,

Mark

Subject: Savannah back up [Was: savannah down (and list bounces again)]
Date: Fri, 25 Nov 2005 10:27:34 +0100

Hi all,

Seems my previous emails (forwarded below) have still not hit the
list :{ But the good news is that savannah is back up again:
http://savannah.gnu.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=4136

Cheers,

Mark

Subject: mailing list troubles
Date: Fri, 25 Nov 2005 12:17:32 +0100

Hi all,

I tried to warn about a couple of issues with the mailing lists and
savannah. But apparently I am one of the people trapped in some insane
spam fighting scheme. Attached are the messages I sent from my normal
email address. Unfortunately gnu.org currently doesn’t accept email from
that address (because it is refusing to handle sender verification
through null reverse paths [mail from: <> bounces]). I hope that some
people will at least get this message. If you are not receiving email,
or are not able to sent email to the various classpath mailing lists
please check the archives at
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/classpath/ or
http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.java.classpath.devel

This being a long thanksgiving weekend for some people makes it
impossible to predict how long this will be an issue. I try to keep you
updated.

Yes, I understand the irony of trying to sent email about email not
working… I’ll try to post something on planet.classpath.org when I
know more.

Sigh,

Mark

Just noticed the Mysaifu JVM project has an English blog. That will safe gary some time translating. There are several interesting notes about porting GNU Classpath to Windows CE and some interesting optimalization hints for improving the system classloader when using zip file class loading.

A little hacking and it seems we get some more Free Swing goodness

Lovely

JamVM 1.4.0

Robert never pushes JamVM very hard. But he really should! His latest JamVM 1.4.0 release adds impressive new features (Soft/Weak/Phantom References, optimized garbage collector, language and reflection type access checks, GNU Classpath 0.19 and CVS support plus improved/added support for PPC-32/64, AMD64 and kfreebsd) and feels really stable. Go Robert!

Seems Egon is another happy customer. He got JChemPaint working out of the box on Kubuntu. Still some stuff to fix, but an encouraging start. I hope his goal, a live chemblaics CD, will be a reality in the not too distant future. It will be hard work to get the last pieces together though.

Merging, merging, merging

Just before GCC 4.1 branched we merged all the latest GNU Classpath (0.19 + CVS) updates into libgcj. GCC now uses subversion and it was pretty OK. It made some things easier then CVS, but learning new tools is always hard. There were a large number of small gotchas that took quite some time. There is just one small patch outstanding to get the Corba support enabled and then Audrius cool swing/corba GNU Classpath example just works. And according to sloccount the result is impressive. We finally passed C++! For all of the gcc codebase we now have:

Totals grouped by language (dominant language first):
ansic:      1183962 (45.42%)
ada:         563241 (21.61%)
java:        430946 (16.53%)
cpp:         306801 (11.77%)
asm:          32642 (1.25%)
sh:           26039 (1.00%)

Next target Ada! :)
yes, I realize these are silly statistics, the addition of gcjx will actually move C++ up again since it is written in C++… Use the best language/tool for the job and all that.

Lots of interesting things in GCC land these days. There is a GCC 4.2 projects page. A proposal for Link-time optimzation (also as pdf paper Link-Time Optimization in GCC: Requirements and High-Level Design). And a proposal for LLVM/GCC Integration. Interesting times indeed.

GNU Classpath hacker room at FOSDEM 2006

Fosdem will be February 25 and 26 in Brussels. We will try to fill a hacker room. So if you have some cool ideas for demos, presentations or discussion topics please let us know.

Mysaifu JVM

Mysaifu JVM is a port of GNU Classpath plus runtime to the Pocket PC 2003. The author provides nice bug reports and also has a blog that I would love the be able to read. Unfortunately I cannot read any Japanese.