On 08/20/2015 03:57 PM, Andrew Hughes wrote: > ----- Original Message ----- >> On 20/08/15 09:24, Matthias Klose wrote: >>> On 08/20/2015 06:36 AM, Tom Tromey wrote: >>>> Andrew> No, it isn't. It's still a necessity for initial bootstrapping of >>>> Andrew> OpenJDK/IcedTea. >>>> >>>> Andrew Haley said the opposite here: >>>> >>>> https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2015-08/msg00537.html >>> >>> if you need bootstrapping OpenJDK 6 or OpenJDK 7, then having gcj >>> available for the target platform is required. Starting with OpenJDK >>> 8 you should be able to cross build OpenJDK 8 with an OpenJDK 8 >>> available on the cross platform. It might be possible to cross >>> build older OpenJDK versions, but this usually is painful. >> >> Sure, but we don't need GCJ going forward. I don't think that there >> are any new platforms to which OpenJDK has not been ported which will >> require GCJ to bootstrap. And even if there are, anybody who needs to >> do that can (and, indeed, should) use an earlier version of GCJ. It's >> not going to go away; it will always be in the GCC repos. And because >> newer versions of GCC may break GCJ (and maybe OpenJDK) it makes more >> sense to use an old GCC/GCJ for the bootstrapping of an old OpenJDK. > > I don't see how we don't at present. How else do you solve the > chicken-and-egg situation of needing a JDK to build a JDK? I don't > see crossing your fingers and hoping there's a binary around > somewhere as a very sustainable system.
That's what we do with GCC, binutils, etc: we bootstrap. > From a personal point of view, I need gcj to make sure each new > IcedTea 1.x and 2.x release bootstraps. Sure, but all that does is test that the GCJ bootstrap still works. And it's probably the only serious use of GCJ left. > I don't plan to hold my system GCC at GCC 5 for the next decade or > however long we plan to support IcedTea 2.x / OpenJDK 7. It's also > still noticeably faster building with a native ecj than OpenJDK's > javac. It would cause me and others a lot of pain to remove gcj at > this point. What exactly is the reason to do so, other than some > sudden whim? It's not a sudden whim: it's something we've been discussing for years. The only reason GCJ is still alive is that I committed to keep it going while we still needed it boot bootstrap OpenJDK. Maintaining GCJ in GCC is a significant cost, and GCJ has reached the end of its natural life. Classpath is substantially unmaintained, and GCJ doesn't support any recent versions of Java. Andrew.
