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 functionality)
is fine by me.

Class files

Jeroen was in town on
Saturday and we had a long and interesting talk. He pointed out that
the new 1.5 class file format PDF is available on the web, and I found
a
pointer. This came at the right time since rewriting the class
reading code was the last thing to do before I could relicense gcjx to
LGPL.

libgcj hacking

I’ve basically got Eclipse 3 working now, though it is still a
bit of a pain to actually get it to run. This will get easier as the
GCC 4.0 release nears.

Today Andrew sent me a patch to implement the class cache idea —
we map class hashes to the name of the corresponding .so. This worked
fine and let me compile random bits of Eclipse 3 (using the BC
compiler with the new verifier) and have it all work with no
application changes at all. Cool stuff.