Date: Fri, 10 Sep 1999 13:35:16 +0200
From: Cees de Groot <cg@cdegroot.com>
To: java-linux@java.blackdown.org
Subject: Re: Gosling says he wants to support Java on Linux

>  The inter-operability problems with Linux are just horrible. You
>  have to be excruciatingly careful because all the different flavours
>  of Linux are all slightly different.
>
Well, he's right that it is horrible, but not right about the reason. The
port is hard because of differences between Solaris and Linux (threads,
signals, X11, SMP, stuff like that - it's a horrible mix). The differences
between Linux glibc releases are there, 2.0, 2.1 and 2.1.2(?) are binary
incompatible, but as far as I can tell these differences are actually
due to support for the stuff that the JVM needs getting better.

I do concur with one of the other speakers - it would be way better to 
have a cleanroom JVM that is made to fit Linux. However, don't underestimate
the complexity of getting everything to run - the JDK source tree is taking
up almost 400 Megs on my box. Apart from the JVM, the Sun JDK
comes with a lot of support classes that lie outside the java.*/javax.*
hierarchies (like RMI - sun.rmi.* is a hefty chunk of code), and then we're
not even talking about an optimized/JIT version of this all. I pray that
Japhar+Classpath get up to Java2 compliance fast (and I urge anyone who
didn't sign the Sun NDA/SCSL to jump in and help out), but I don't see
that happen in a reasonable timeframe. 

My hope is that once the Java platform settles, and Sun knows that the 
pressure is a bit off the kettle wrt compliance (because ECMA adapted
the thing as a standard or whatever), they'll go full Open Source. At
present, the Blackdown porting effort is mainly a debugging effort and
that could be parallelized very well...

-- 
Cees de Groot               http://www.cdegroot.com     <cg@cdegroot.com>


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