Re: VMInterface addition: Make native library names part ofVMInterface

[Chris Gray]

On Thursday 06 November 2003 12:04, Sascha Brawer wrote:
> Andrew Haley <address@hidden> wrote on Thu, 6 Nov 2003 10:28:24 +0000:
> >> [having the VMInterfaces classes clearly marked as 'special'
> >> would make it easy for VMs and compilers to just inline all calls
> >> to them]
> >
> >It's not particularly difficult to do, but at the moment we don't do
> >it.  gcj is perfectly capable of whole-program Java optimization but
> >we have to follow Java rules, and one of those rules is that you
> >cannot inline final methods because it breaks binary compatibility.
> >We could teach gcj that VM<foo> classes are an exception to that rule,
> >but I think you would agree that's not a pretty solution.
>
> Apparently, Java 1.5 will have "meta-data" (arbitrary, uninterpreted
> declarations for language constructs that are represented in bytecode and
> accessible via reflection), similar to CLI/.NET. This might be a much
> cleaner approach for declaring such exceptions. Of course, the free
> compilers would need to support it first.

You could do it already using the "Attributes" mechanism - Java 
implementations are supposed to silently ignore attributes they don't 
understand. The attributes could be inserted by a tool using BCEL, so you 
wouldn't actually need to modify the compiler ...

-- 
Chris Gray                                /k/ Embedded Java Solutions
Embedded & Mobile Java, OSGi              http://www.kiffer.be/k/
address@hidden                      +32 477 599 703