Re: JamaicaVM and GNU Classpath

[Andy Walter]

On Thursday 24 October 2002 02:53, Brian Jones wrote:
> Andy Walter <address@hidden> writes:

> We're rather free with the CVS access.

Fine.


> We haven't spent a great deal of time optimizing the library for speed
> or memory usage.

No problem. It is, of course, important to us, so we will invest some time 
here.


> By chance do you also have support for the JPDA?

Not yet. We already started implementing JPDA, but delayed in favour of some 
urgent projects. I hope that we get a first implementation (JVMDI only and 
with some restrictions) within the next 6 months.


> A platfom independent layer, call it a library, to abstract away
> socket and file i/o and other needed system calls has been on my todo
> list for a while.  I'd actually prefer to use NSPR or APR for this
> purpose but I think they do more than Classpath needs and they also
> complicate the licensing issue.

I don't know about NSPR and APR, but a library is not exactly what we wanted 
to use (because of code size and performance matters). What we currently have 
is a general set of macros for socket and file i/o access (and other evil 
functions such as malloc. Having a garbage collector that avoids or copes 
with memory fragmentation is close to being useless if the native code makes 
use of malloc that causes memory fragmentation for the memory outside of GC 
control). Each macro may or may not be defined in platform-dependent include 
files. If a macro was not implemented there, the generic one for POSIX 
systems is used.

Since some of our target systems don't even provide a file system, not to 
speak about networking, we can entirely omit those functions in that case. 


Kind regards,

        Andy.

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