On 11/11/2013 09:27 PM, Matthias Klose wrote: > Am 11.11.2013 11:06, schrieb Andrew Haley: >> 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. > > that's only partly true. Sure, when using an unreleased OpenJDK snapshot > (leading to OpenJDK 8), then you are probably correct, however doing that for > a > released version of OpenJDK, it is still needed.
Well, yes, but we're talking about legacy systems: for legacy OpenJDK you need legacy GCJ. There's no need for a new GCJ for porting new OpenJDK. Andrew.
