I’ve been doing a lot of debugging lately. I am very unhappy with the current state of debuggers. For instance, right now I’m looking into a code generation bug in gcj. I’m debugging the generated code to understand what is going wrong. I want to set a breakpoint in a function that is called just [...]
Thursday, October 28, 2004
Geoff posted an interesting plan for GCC. The ensuing conversation pointed out that, if we do this, we might as well just use LLVM. Anything that gets us a JIT and the potential ability to remove libffi (if you have a JIT, then a back end port can simply be reused to provide the same [...]
Today we moved the repository for the Jacks java compiler testing project into the Mauve cvs repository. Mauve has come a long way since Anthony and I started it all those years ago, and with the addition of Jacks it is probably the most comprehensive free test suite for the core of a Java implementation. [...]
Thursday, October 21, 2004
There’s been planning internally at Red Hat for a while to host a Free Java Summit. This is a reality now, it will be happening November 18 and 19 in Boston. The agenda is still in a state of flux, but I gather one of the main focuses will be promoting better cooperation, unity, and [...]
I downloaded Croquet today to give it a try. This didn’t work out very well, but I’m still optimistic about this project. For one thing, this eliminates my need for a gdb/irc interface, by adding collaboration to the whole desktop. The screen shots look super-cool, the 3D-ness makes me immediately think that lack of screen [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Wednesday, October 6, 2004
Yesterday I got my first .s file from gcjx. This means that enough gcc integration exists to avoid crashing, and that a fair chunk of the tree lowering pass exists. I wrote a letter about making a new gcc branch, now I just have to make myself actually send it… Eclipse 3 Today I got [...]
Tonight I turned gcjx into a shared library and hacked on the tree back end enough to make it link. You have to go through some build hackery to make this work for yourself — I suggest waiting for the gcc branch. That should be coming a lot sooner than I thought. My goal is [...]
Saturday, October 2, 2004
This week was fairly scattered, I ended up doing a little bit all over. Work was mostly bug fixing, or in some cases just bashing up against regressions all over. We never have quite enough testing or quite enough time to look at little problems as they crop up. And of course the test suite [...]