Mark J. Wielaard

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!

Bryce Mckinlay published his presentation on free testsuites, the presentation on free desktop libraries (AWT & Swing) by Tom Fitzsimmons and Graydon Hoare and the presentation on GNU gcj by Tom Tromey.

Hint – don’t use that template with white text on a dark background. If the beamer isn’t that good or the screen is small such slides are really hard to read.

Published the GNU Classpath presentation and the Free Software Community, GPL, Compromising, Trust and Control workshop slides that we used in Boston.

Been playing with the CVS version of GCC (which will become GCC 4.0 – note to self, update the libgcj portion with all the GNU Classpath updates that have gone in) and the result is stunning! Tom Tromey had shown how to create a pre-compiled version of Eclipse 3.0. It is really easy now to pre-compile anything (the pain is compiling RHUG first, but the work on GNU JAXP will make this a lot easier.)

I have been using gcj precompiled Eclipse with kaffe as JRE to see how easy it would be to mix and match running with a native gcj Eclipse version and using some other runtime as execution engine for the created programs. That works just fine. (There is also a gcjbuilder Eclipse plugin that integrates the native GCJ compiler within Eclipse build infrastructure.) I had never been very impressed by Eclipse since I had only ran it with interpreters till now and then it feels a bit sluggish. But this thing is fast! Startup is under 10 seconds (even with multiple projects open). Importing GNU Classpath (and building it all) just takes seconds. Editing feels smooth and autocompletion works instantly.

Now that some of the other runtimes have also been able to work with this large program it will be fun to see how quickly we can shake out all the bugs. Then we must follow the lead of the Debian hackers and build the whole thing from source!

Back from the summit in Boston. Will post an overview soon. For now take a look at the picture plus writeup of Richard Li (one of the ACS/RedHat CMS people).

Apparently everybody but me had seen the discussion on GCJ, Native Java Compilation and Eclipse by David Orme. It is an interesting read. And it is good to see others are also dreaming of the same kind of future we are working on. The only piece missing in this story seems to be java-gnome which I think is the real “lynchpin” to be honest. Using Eclipse as IDE to create new free software with gcj build around native java-gnome applications (with glade for example) seems like a winner to me.

Build and Run!

Always wanted to know how those people writing on Planet Classpath and those hard working GNU Classpath hackers looked liked?

Please let me know if you want another picture in there or if that picture isn’t you, but some random other person with the same name on the internet.

Happy to see so much positive feedback to Mark Howard’s post about the java-gnome status.

One reply was really interesting since it came with a presentation ”From thin clients to web apps and back again”. The part on Development Technology explains the platform (GNU/Linux – liveCDs), programming language (java), widget-set (java-gnome), and development platform/runtime (gcj), the alternatives and why this set was chosen. Worth a quick read.

Advogato

When advogato was down a couple of months ago I moved my diary to my own site. Which also hosts Planet Classpath. I should probably try to cross post my dairy on advogato since it is a nice community.

gcj

Saw that rbultje had some trouble with GNU gcj. It is always painful to see someones first steps with one of your projects be so hard. Especially since he hit a long standing usability bug. The solution to your problem was to do:

cd ..
gcj -o myapp application/*.java --main=application.Application

But that probably only makes sense if you know a little bit more about how gcj (and java in general) puts modules (packages) in directories, but uses dot (.) in source files or when indicating classes in a package on the command line.

Not being able to find the GTK+ AWT libraries is strange though. If you installed gcc yourself then you need to configure with --enable-java-awt=gtk, --enable-java-awt=xlib for the pure xlib version or, if you want both, --enable-java-awt=gtk,xlib. Normally distributions do already ship packages like this. If you are using Debian unstable then please note that the current libgcj5-awt package is broken in testing/sarge. This should be solved by the package in unstable that hopefully enters testing before the freeze.

Please send an email to the mailinglist if you have trouble with gcj. Or drop by on #gcj on irc.oftc.net. There are always people there that might be able to help and get you through your first steps in a couple of minutes. You don’t have to spend hours struggling on your own.