Bad news?

Bad
news for Free Java? It’s hard to say, I suppose it depends on the
details. One key sentence: “This agreement recognizes that cutting
edge R&D and intellectual property protection are the foundation for
the growth and success of our industry.” To me this says that Sun
fears free software more than they fear MS… bad move, Sun. I hope
that this is just some administrative agreement and the actual changes
simply won’t materialize.

Occasionally I think we should just strike off in our own
direction — make a new language and virtual machine for the free
world. This is a lot of work and there are things that make it
unattractive. It isn’t clear we could attain the critical mass
necessary to make it work.

Cooperation

One way to have cooperation between Mono and some Free Java
implementation is, of course, IKVM. Another way would be to take
Mono, parts of IKVM and combine them with the proposed (but still
undocumented, sorry) Pluggable JIT API. Then we could have
gcj-compiled code running inside Mono.

Another idea would be to just write a C#/CIL front end to gcc and
have it target the same runtime that gcj does. Writing a front end
like this really isn’t hard, especially now that tree-ssa is gearing
up to be merged into the gcc main line. This is important because it
means that the tree interface to gcc will finally be documented,
making it much simpler to generate.

Forking

I’ve heard some people, UI hackers mostly, suggest that delegates
are the most important C# feature missing from Java. Personally, like
Sun, I think anonymous classes are just fine for this. But if not,
maybe we in the free world should just extend Java. We could easily
have delegates at the source level map to anonymous classes in the
bytecode.

Likewise I sometimes think about adding something like pinvoke to
gcj. I don’t think it buys you much, either in terms of maintenance
or in performance, but people seem to like it. Sometimes that’s
reason enough to do something.

I guess Sun is right, us crazy free software folks just think
about forking all the time. Shame on me.