This weekend I made the bytecode generation parts of gcjx
actually compile. There are still crashing bugs in this code, and
parts are missing, so even if it didn’t crash you still wouldn’t see
.class files.

Work here has pointed out how I cut corners to get to this point,
so I’m having to go back and fill in missing things. From the outside
this can look weird, e.g., tonight I made new actually
find the constructor it is going to invoke, something which appears
pretty basic. It isn’t really a big deal, though, just a consequence
of the approach I’ve taken to development.

For this particular project I chose a style of total freedom in
terms of ordering. So, I just do whatever I’m interested in at a
given moment. I don’t worry much about getting everything perfect;
instead, I just litter the code with “fixme” comments.

This means there will be more work later on, cleaning up the final
bits, making sure all the appropriate error messages are emitted, etc.
I’m not too concerned about this, since there is already the excellent
Jacks test suite to back me up. Plus, this way is more fun as it lets
me get to various milestones more quickly. In practice I seem to be
alternating periods of pure development, where things don’t even
compile, periods of polishing to get things building again, and
periods of fixing bugs. You can see this reflected in the ChangeLog
by looking at the average paragraph lengths.

This approach probably wouldn’t scale. That doesn’t seem to be a
big deal as I’m the only person hacking gcjx at the moment. I wonder
how real it has to be before I look for help.

Speaking of which, I sent a feeler to Eric Blake about the idea of
using Jikes as the gcj front end. I think this would be excellent
because Jikes is already complete, and it would let us merge efforts
— the Free Java world is really too small for us to split our labor
across multiple compilers. Unfortunately I can’t answer the question
“what’s in it for Jikes?”. I assume that that consideration, plus
legal barriers, make this impossible. That’s why I started gcjx back
in December. But truthfully I still hope we can find an agreement.