Found on the harmony mailinglist:
> we recommend they start to contribute by submitting Classpath patches (which we could kindly call “Classpatches” :-)
Well, since Apache was “a patchy server” this would not be quite out of league :)
The Auto-vectorization with gcj looks exciting. If this can be made to work for java source files (and it looks like it is almost there already) then we will see some very nice speedups. Auto-vectorization in GCC has some examples in C and Fortran that GCC supports now. There is also the GCC Autovectorization Enhancements wiki.
Impressed by the fact that wikipedia runs on gcj for Lucene indexing. As Anthony pointed out on the Harmony list this is a showcase for Apache and GNU technology working together in an important real-world application. Also nice to see that traditional tools like gprof and oprofile can and are used to analyze performance. Seems we need to look at our regex implementation to give them a little speed boost.
Also on the horizon the next Debian (sarge) release! The Call for upgrade testing was just announced.
BTW. It seems some spam filters need to be adjusted to the new German spam. Currently fighting my way through mailman approval for some legitimate messages from new people on the GNU Classpath mailinglist. Please be patient, your message will arrive eventually.
Finally some nice press about our OpenOffice/GCJ community work. GCJ is now also mentioned on the OpenOffice.org homepage. Please help out if you can.
Taking a little time off-line. I’ll be back answering email after the weekend.
Just got a thank you email from Richard Stallman about our progress with OpenOffice 2.0 and GCJ 4 for both communities. The FSF has also updated the text at http://www.fsf.org/news/open-office-java.html to better reflect our current status:
Volunteers needed to build, test and package free OpenOffice 2.0
The FSF is looking for volunteers to build, test and packagefully free versions of OpenOffice 2.0 that use GCJ as a replacement for the non-free Java platform. OpenOffice and GCJ hackers have worked hard to make sure that all the new features of the next version of OpenOffice 2.0 written in the java programming language will build and run with GCJ, the GNU Compiler for java part of GCC 4.0. This support was just very recently added to GCJ and OpenOffice and does not yet work completely out of the box. OpenOffice 2.0 is not finished yet, but beta versions are available. We want to make sure that when OpenOffice 2.0 final is released everything builds and runs out of the box with GCC 4.0 for all Free Software users.
Please write to java@gcc.gnu.org for a list of bugs, patches and feature requests needed for better support and instructions for testing and reporting bugs to the GCJ and OpenOffice teams.
Thanks to all involved! Lets work together from here to make both OpenOffice 2.0 and GCJ 4 rock. If you haven’t tried out these new programs together please try and help us improve them.
How to take the fun out of someones achievement
Uraeus post made me sad. It was an hectic week, but is seems our Harmony effort is already a success. planet.classpath.org saw a record number of visitors, the irc channel has been full of interested people and after some discussions back and forth it seems that everybody agrees that whatever happens next it will be a good thing for the whole community. I would love to meet my new harmony friends at ApacheCon Europe next month or meet some of the current GNU Classpath hackers at LinuxTag (during which cbj announced that I would be the new maintainer two years ago). But I decided instead to go to Guadec. I saved my last money to pay for the trip, stay and entrance fee (!). Just because I wanted to see all the cool presentations about Gnome using gcj, GNU Classpath, Eclipse and java-gnome. And to learn how to better integrate our AWT, Swing and Graphics libraries with gtk+, cairo, pango and the rest of the Gnome platform. But it seems that it is time to stop kidding ourselves that we will enhance the Gnome desktop with our efforts. Sigh.
Posted some thoughts on how GNU Classpath hackers can help Harmony.
Sven then did a little dance!
These guys are cool, and by cool I mean totally sweet.
Yes, that announcement wasn’t really well coordinated.
But I tried to make my views clear on the mailinglist.
Please read and enjoy. I just don’t have much time this weekend, but I do hope this will work out great.
Update: Posted about Harmony! to the GNU Classpath mailinglist. With links to:
The latest numbers from David Gilbert about GNU Classpath and Mauve progress are in (yes, I am behind on email):
Also forgot to mention that GNU Classpath 0.15 was released last week.
Optimized nio and nio.charset plus io streams integration leading to large speedups in character stream performance. To complement this new framework a native iconv based charset provider was added. Better support for free swing metal and pluggable lafs. Some org.omg.CORBA support added. Better java.beans support for the Eclipse Visual Editor Project. Completely lock free ThreadLocal implementation added. More javax.swing.text support for RTF and HTML. More flexible runtime interfaces and build configuration options.
26 people actively contributed code to 0.15 and made 299 CVS commits during the last two months of development (that is 5 commits each and every day). diffstat since 0.14: 993 files changed, 74259 insertions(+), 15666 deletions(-). Sloccount now gives us 344,505 lines of code. That is up 16,774 lines (or 279 lines per day) of pure source code since 0.14. We now PASS 27,325 of 27,959 Mauve tests (up from 25,442 out of 25,912 with 0.14).
Happy news for those following the OpenOffice.org 2.0 melodrama. Caolan made the new document Writer wizards working under gcj. He also has a list of bugs, patches and feature requests needed for better support.
We might soon need a bigger planet! Thomas Fitzsimmons now has a blog that is aggregated on planet.classpath.org. Welcome Tom! And Mark Howard got a fresh new blog. He had an old blog on the planet earlier, but I somehow missed his movement announcement. Sorry Mark.
If you are reading this on the planet please scroll down a bit to catch their older posts.
