Posted
on March 2, 2005, 16:12,
by mjw.
LugRadio
Sven de Marothy made it on LugRadio. He describes his experiences on the GNU Classpath mailinglist. It is interesting to see how these things work. I was mainly surprized about how the interviewers wanted it to be some fight between mono and GNU Classpath. While in reality mono is of course just one of the execution environments for GNU Classpath based programs through IKVM. They did reach an interesting conclusion though. There is so much free software out there written in the java programming language and GNU Classpath based compilers/runtimes like gcj can now support so many millions lines of code like eclipse, jonas, jakarta, etc that it is a very safe and solid choice to build upon (or as Sascha would say “it is the cobol of this millennium”, but that doesn’t sound as sexy).
JCVM
Normally I avoid introducing all the runtimes based on GNU Classpath since it seems to confuse non-core developers (see the above interview with Sven). People seem to be scared of choice. But the recent improvements of JCVM are impressive and drive home the point why we are better of with Free Software and the freedom of exploring various different execution models for free software.
JCVM has sometimes been described as a “poor man’s gcj” since it is a ahead of time compiler generating native code, but can only compile from .class files and actually generates C source files, not object code. It isn’t a “real” compiler like gcj which is embedded into the GNU Compiler Collection GCC, and uses the GCC framework to do most of its optimisations. JCVM optimizes the byte code and transforms them into C source files and lets gcc optimize the C source files which produces the ELF object files. Surprizingly (at least to me) this sometimes generates much faster code then gcj does. As seen by some optimization experiments done by Tzvetan Mikov. It will be interesting to see when such improvements will be carried over to GCC or other compiler frameworks.
If you haven’t read it, and you are interested in the issues and challenges of creating a execution model for programs written in the java programming language then you should read the JCVM Manual. It has a lot of very interesting low level details in it.
Comments Off on PR and technology progress
Posted
on February 24, 2005, 01:30,
by mjw.
Take a look at the list of new Fedora Core packages since FC3. Notice anything interesting? No wonder they are going to slip the release date a bit to make sure they have a stable gcc 4.
Comments Off on New Fedora Core 4 packages
Posted
on February 19, 2005, 02:01,
by mjw.
Escape the Java Trap!
The official program for Escape the Java Trap! is finally ready.
You are very welcome to join us and learn about the IKVM architecture and how to freely mix and match traditional java and .net applications and libraries, how GNU and Apache developers can and should work together, how you can do rapid GNOME desktop development through java-gnome, how researchers are using GNU Classpath to do cutting edge research into Just In Time compilation, see demonstrations of lightning fast native eclipse and jonas, learn what will be possible with GNU Classpath and GCC 4.0, whether Kaffe will ever release their version 1.1.5, what we think about compatibility, freedom vs control and learn how you can create your own GNU Compiler Collection frontend for languages such as the 1.5 java programming language.
Everybody is really excited about the event this year. A very big thanks to Fosdem for hosting us the weekend of 26 and 27 February in Brussels, Belgium. I think we have a very nice list of speakers. And there will be lots of very interesting announcements and demos. See the full program list and talk abstracts.
Please add your name to the list if you will be there.
Comments Off on 19 Feb 2005
Posted
on February 14, 2005, 14:40,
by mjw.
Make sure you attend!
Lots of cool talks about kaffe, gcj(x), GNU Classpath, IKVM.net, Apache, java-gnome, and a guest appearance by the CACAO developers. And lots of fun preparing the goals and priorities for the next year.
Please add yourself the the participation list if you will come. And please suggest some discussion topics for the Technical Session!
Comments Off on GNU Classpath @ Fosdem 2005
Posted
on February 12, 2005, 10:40,
by mjw.
Thomas Fitszimmons needs a blog. So he can post cool screenshots of his work on gcj and libjawt like this one:
Go Tom! Go!
Comments Off on Thomas needs a blog
Posted
on February 12, 2005, 00:48,
by mjw.
Hint if you use the jhbuild setup from Thomas Fitzsimmons to build the new gcj gui branch. Make sure you add the following lines to your ~/.jhbuildrc file:
# We need the latest snapshot branch
branches[’cairo’] = ‘SNAPSHOT_0_3_0′
# And the latest gui branch for gcj
branches[’gcj’] = ‘java-gui-20050128-branch’
And yes, this allows you to install and run jedit (a little bit) as seen in this screenshot by Graydon.
Comments Off on New gui branch building
Posted
on January 31, 2005, 12:56,
by mjw.
Comments Off on Through the Looking Glass
Posted
on January 7, 2005, 03:44,
by mjw.
A new year a new GNU Classpath release (0.13).
Lots of nice new goodies again: Includes HTTP/1.1 and FTP URL handlers. Added java.beans XMLEncoder and XMLDecoder classes. More than 250 locales are supported now. SAX, DOM, XSL and XPath implementations for javax.xml (JAXP 1.3) have been added. Better Swing and AWT on gtk+ support. An AWT Robot implementation based on the XServer XTest Extension for the gtk+ peers has been added.
22 people are listed in the ChangeLog file and there were 245 commits to CVS since the last release (that is 4.9 commits a day!).
Total Physical Source Lines of Code included in GNU Classpath is up from 248,443 (0.12) to 320,883 (0.13) according to SLOCCount.
Amazing!
Go hackers! Go!
Comments Off on Happy GNU Year!
Posted
on December 26, 2004, 14:34,
by mjw.
Please support this initiative!
From: Florian Mueller
To: info-gnu@gnu.org
Subject: EU software patents: please express gratitude to Poland
Please take a minute to visit http://thankpoland.info and express your
gratitude to the Polish government for its courageous last-minute
intervention in the Council of the European Union against software patents
on Tuesday (21 Dec).
Poland prevented, at least for the time being, the adoption of a legislative
proposal that would legalize software patents in the EU. The respective
text looks like it forbids software patents while it actually codifies
almost all of the excuses with which the European patent systems (European
Patent Office and national patent offices) have been granting software
patents for a number of years, contrary to the European Patent Convention.
The EU Council could not have turned that proposal into an effective law
right away. The Council’s “Common Position” would have to go back to the
European Parliament for a second reading, in which the majority requirements
to make any amendment are however very high.
What the Polish government did was very unusual in EU politics. The EU
Council has a two-tiered approach to decision-making, and in the entire
history of the EU there has been no more than one case so far in which a
political agreement (which was reached on software patents on 18 May 2004)
was not turned into a formal decision later. So Poland accepted to pay a
diplomatic price for potentially preserving the freedom of software
developers. No other country was prepared to do so.
Please also participate in the “Thank you, Poland” campaign if you are not
an EU citizen. The EU’s legislative process on software patents will have a
major impact on what will happen with patent legislations worldwide. If all
of the first world is under a US-style software patent regime, emerging
markets will follow. This is the chance to rein in the patent system by
democratic means, which would also increase the chances of a future patent
reform in the US.
Florian
Comments Off on Thank you, Poland!
Posted
on December 10, 2004, 17:52,
by mjw.
Michael Hind published his slides from the Free Alternative Runtimes Summit.
The Jikes RVM Story (and some well-known myths about dynamic optimization).
It was a really good presentation, so go read the slides and learn!
Comments Off on JikesRVM presentation
