There’s been a lot of interesting gcj and free Java work lately.

Tom Fitzsimmons has
made
Slime
Volleyball
work
in gcjwebplugin. That’s an important milestone for AWT work.

Anthony Green has made a new ant task to make it
easy to create native shared libraries from your Java code. He also
got
Eclipse 3 running using gij, though at the moment this still
requires a couple ugly hacks.

To Do List

Mark Wielaard ran gjdoc over Classpath recently and made some
online docs. This process is still much too slow and error prone —
Tom Fitzsimmons points out that there are about 40 javadoc
command-line options that gjdoc still doesn’t support. We really
need someone to get this moving along so that we can generate
documentation nightly.

Brian Jones had the excellent
idea that Mauve and JAPI should be linked so that we can see not
only API coverage but also API correctness. Yet another item for the
to-do list.

gcjx

This weekend I fixed a bunch of jacks-related bugs. I rewrote and
cleaned up access control, fixed a little parser bug, and did a few
other things. gcjx is down to 609 jacks failures, which is excellent
— better than gcj and I still haven’t written definite assignment.

gcjx code generation still needs some work. I wrote a little
script to try to load all the .class files generated by a jacks run.
This found a number of code generation bugs, via verifier failures.

Anyway, gcjx is pretty close to being actually useful for java
hacking. I’m hoping to be able to replace the gcj front end this
year; that seems like an achievable goal. This would mean replacing
it with no regressions (except perhaps in gcc bootstrap time), only
improvements and new features.