I’ve had a full week and didn’t manage to find a minute to write
about the Free Java Summit, which was about a week ago. I thought it
was fairly successful.

There were a number of good talks. For me the most interesting
ones were about the Jupiter VM and about JikesRVM,
which is really an excellent program (check out MMTk, a GC-building
toolkit).

Miguel was there and he talked about Mono, and after the talks
spoke a bit about the Mono debugger and other things. We did talk
briefly about the possibility of a completely shared runtime — one
that could run both Java and .NET bytecode, without needing any of the
hacks that IKVM needs — but the
general consensus seemed to be that there isn’t a real use case for
it. That’s too bad, it sounds like a fun project 🙂

The very best thing, though, was that Onno Kluyt was there. He
chairs the JCP and urged us to join. Whether this will happen remains
unclear — we need yet another pass through the legalese — but the
current plan is to have someone (Dalibor 🙂 join and see about
running the TCK against kaffe.

BC Merge

I merged the BC branch to the trunk this last week. This turned
into a horrible disaster. My testing failed to catch some
bootstrap-breaking bugs, I failed to cvs add a couple of files, we
broke ARM newlib yet again (this port is the canary for the most
trivial target port bugs). I spent most of the weekend hanging my
head in shame.

gcjx

Elliott Hughes wrote a lot of nice code for gcjx this weekend,
including adding internationalization support to the output
formatter. He also has a knack for finding bugs.

My recent gcjx hacking has been on attributes. I think all the
parsing and semantic analysis of attributes is working ok. gcjx still
doesn’t read them from class files, or write them. And we don’t
actually use them in the compiler, e.g. @Override doesn’t
do anything yet. Still, this is a big step forward.

The missing 1.5 bits for gcjx are: some work on enums, and
implementing generic methods. The latter looks simpler than I had
feared.