[coyotos-dev] Accept GCJ into the tool chain?

[Haplo]

I don't suggest it. Java has a lot of problems, the biggest being  
that java is entirely decoded at runtime. Java has always had the  
drawback of being slow, and even on MacOSX where java is (or at least  
was) a major supported language for applications, they were always  
notoriously slow and usually ugly. Furthermore, coyotos, as you have  
said many times, is supposed to find its way into integrated  
applications, specifically in the medical field for stability  
reasons. If you use java, any applications, many of which will be  
sensitive, would be at the mercy of the virtual machine. Do you  
really want applications like that to be forced to run under code  
which is not your own? Also, java is a pain to develop with, and not  
well suited to applications running directly under the OS. Even if  
you had some other language for your main applications, java has  
still been proven very poor for that use.

On Nov 26, 2006, at 2:40 PM, Jonathan S. Shapiro wrote:

> There is code in our tree that would benefit from using a language  
> like
> Java or C#. Specifically, from a language providing safe pointers,
> garbage collection, and exceptions. Because of this, it was  
> unfortunate
> that we could *not* rely on Java for anything in the EROS tree. There
> were several reasons for this:
>
> 1. The JDK was not openly available. This meant that the cost of
> bringing up an EROS-hosted Java runtime was prohibitive.
>
> 2. There was no alternative that was sufficiently mature. The GNU
> ClassPath library was in its early stages and proceeding very slowly.
> The Kaffe VM was insufficiently mature. GCJ didn't yet exist in usable
> form.
>
> 3. Our build model was (and remains) heavily dependent on traditional
> UNIX tools such as "make". The Java build model and execution model
> wasn't terribly friendly to our build environment.
>
> Two critical things have changed since then:
>
> 1. GCJ and ClassPath have made huge strides. The current version of  
> GCJ
> has been used to compile some very large systems, most notably  
> Eclipse.
> This means that GCJ is probably usable enough for our purposes. The  
> next
> version (4.2) will move forward to a ClassPath library that is very
> nearly functionally complete. This addresses points (1,2,3).
>
> 2. Two weeks ago, Sun announced a plan to release Java SE and much of
> the class library under GPL (http://www.sun.com/2006-1113/ 
> feature/). It
> is unclear what they will be forced to withhold from the class  
> library,
> but it is likely that a community will rapidly emerge to replace
> whatever items must be withheld. This addresses points (1,2).
>
> So: should we now consider adopting Java as a significant language for
> application development in Coyotos?
>
>
>
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