Everyone has read and is talking about Havoc’s article.
It’s great to see this debate taking place.

Of course, I’m in the “let’s use gcj camp”. I think gcj is an
excellent solution to these sorts of problems. For instance, in
general I think JIT approaches are over-rated, most applications are
mostly static and can benefit from precompilation. Second, with the
gcj changes currently in progress, we’ll be more than partly erasing
this distinction.

Some of the debate centers around language issues: “is C# better
than Java?”. Personally I think Java is just fine. It isn’t my ideal
language (I doubt C# would be either); but it is more than acceptable
for the problem space. That’s hardly a ringing endorsement, but then
I’m very skeptical when I hear assertions — concerning productivity
or other things — about any programming language.

As I see it, we already know we need a Free Java implementation.
There is already a lot of actually existing free Java code that is
useful, and more importantly actually used. So the community already
has to expend effort here. There are also a lot of nice Java tools
out there; Eclipse being one of the flagship products. It seems
wasteful to me to try to reproduce this environment for another
similar-but-different runtime and language.

There are the other legal arguments about patents and openness and
such. I tend to discount these. I mean, it is important that if MS
has a patent covering .NET, that we-as-community actually have strong
reasons to believe it won’t affect us. But it seems to me that any
patent in, say, the JIT space could affect the JVM and .NET equally.

Sun’s process is a bit closed, it is true. But Sun has been
slowly coming along, and I think as Free Java gains momentum they will
come around to deal with us. They’ll have to, and the results will be
to everybody’s benefit. There’s been a lot of rumbling about this
from IBM lately; I’m sure we’ll see more progress here.

More prosaically, gcjx is nearing code generation. If I find time
this weekend it will generate its first .class file by
Monday. There is still a huge amount to do; if you’ve ever wanted to
hack a compiler front end, or learn about gcc trees, let me know.

Also, some of us are gathering on the libffi list,
libffi-discuss@sources.redhat.com, to talk about doing libffi releases
on a separate schedule from GCC releases. It turns out that there
actually are libffi users other than libgcj, and that they actually
want a say in what goes on. That’s great news.