On 11/11/2013 03:22 AM, Jeff Law wrote: > On 11/09/13 08:55, Andrew Haley wrote: >> On 11/09/2013 03:44 PM, Alec Teal wrote: >>> If Java must go, and it must have a replacement Ada makes sense. The >>> issues with Go (sadly, you guys are doing superb work) do make sense. >>> >>> I don't know enough about Java (the GCC front end and such) to know if >>> it should go, if it does go why should it be replaced? >> >> It always was very useful for detecting bugs in GCC: the code flow tends >> to trigger bugs that don't get detected by the usual GCC testsuites. > That's certaily been the case in the past, but I'm seeing less and less > of that now. If we can get coverage of the non-call-exceptions paths > and cut 15% off the build/test cycle, then I think it's worth it. > > I'd even be willing to explicitly make this a trial and reinstate GCJ if > we find that GCJ is catching problems not caught by the existing default > language & runtime systems. > > Andrew -- my big question is what's the state of OpenJDK for other > architectures. The most obvious being ARM(64), but in general, what's > the process for bootstrapping OpenJDK on a new target
It's no different from porting GCC/libc. You have to write an assembler back end, the native parts of the runtime library, a bytecode interpreter, relocs for the runtime linker, and the compiler back end. Call it two programmer-years to get something decent working. > and is GCJ an integral part of that process. We have used GCJ in the past when porting OpenJDK because OpenJDK wasn't cross-compilable, but that's fixed now: we can cross-compile from a host which already has OpenJDK. So we don't need GCJ for that. Andrew.
