Mon, 11 Oct 2004
gcjx hacking
Telling the gcc world about gcjx, so far, has been a painless process. I'll be making my branch sometime pretty soon, maybe this week.
In the meantime I made boxing, unboxing, varargs, and static import work. That means that all the easy additions to the language are working. Now on to fix up the harder things. I got a burst of energy for this since Mark pointed me at a non-click-through way to see the JLS3 (complete with change bars).
The algorithm for handling generic methods is several pages of notation, it reads like a math text. One wonders if this isn't overkill.
LLVMSome day, if I'm super motivated, I'll hook gcjx up to LLVM. Well, maybe someone else will. I'm actually more interested in LLVM's potential to provide a JIT for libgcj. That seems stalled on exception handling (the problem child) at the moment, but hopefully someday someone will implement the small piece of infrastructure we need.
License HarmonyThe whole gcjx effort would probably not be needed at all if we had better license harmony. Instead we would just share efforts with some other free java compiler. This situation is pretty lame. I suppose we could have worked around it by having a little driver that runs a different compiler and feeds the resulting class files to gcj; but that feels too much like intentional GPL circumvention for my taste.
Of course, now that I've sunk a year's worth of spare time hacking into this, I find I don't really want us to reach license harmony.
Nevertheless, I see this as one of two major issues facing free software, with the other being patents. Patents are an external threat, a way that companies intent on protecting their antiquated business models can (with luck temporarily) defeat us.
Lack of license harmony is more of an internal threat, balkanizing the community: putting up barriers to code sharing and communication, and creating software stacks that ought to interoperate but cannot do so efficiently.
posted at: 00:27 | path: /software | permanent link to this entry
The Control Room
An interesting documentary about the Al Jazeera network. Trenchant yet, for my taste, a bit jumpy. The political observations in it have circulated on the US left for quite a while, so it wasn't surprising, but nevertheless it managed to be moving. Squeamish as I am, I had to close my eyes a couple of times. The personal observations were quite well done, reminiscent in a small way of The Sorrow and the Pity.
posted at: 00:09 | path: /movies | permanent link to this entry
