Today I checked out the newly-free javac and built it with (heresy?) Eclipse. Aside from waiting for it to build (this machine is a bit over-taxed at the moment), this only took a few minutes to set up.

I read through it a little bit, but not extensively. Overall it seems well done… easy to read, has a reasonable amount of javadoc, the big-picture layout is easy to follow, it uses generics throughout, etc.

I’m not sure what I was expecting really. Something more painful I suppose; I think I assume that all programs will be a pain to set up and build. It helps, of course, that Andrew and others got there earlier and put some needed support code into Classpath 🙂

It doesn’t look outrageously hard to add code to support using javac as a front end to gcj, the way we’re using ecj right now.