Re: Working On Classpath

[Michael Koch]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Am Donnerstag, 27. Mai 2004 08:16 schrieb Thomas Zander:
> On Wednesday 26 May 2004 23:47, Andrew John Hughes wrote:
> >  Given the
> > length of time that the Free Java projects have now been active,
> > it amazes me that so little consideration is given to alternate
> > VMs and compilers by the Java community, especially for FOSS.
>
> The free-java projects have made a bad start; when I just started
> using Java I tried kaffe and Jikes. Kaffe was totally unusable; and
> since I still can't apt-get it, its not on my radar.  (I'm
> wondering how many distro's ship kaffe.)
> Jikes is a good example of Foss going wrong; in the time I was
> using 1.11 up-until 1.13, mostly because of its speed.
> During this time more and more problems came in; errors in
> compiling that were not errors at all, and un-verifiable classes
> which caused clients to not be able to run the software as soon as
> it was compiled with jikes. I'm not sure if the situation with
> jikes cleared up; but our company still has a VERY strict policy
> about not using jikes; ever!
>
> footnote; I compiled Mauve some weeks ago only to find out that on
> suns-javac it did not compile. The problem was an
> illegal-code-construct. This tells me that jikes still is not
> mature enough for production code (since many people compiled it
> fine in the weeks before)

I can compile Mauve fine with javac. Except that its slow it works. 
Jikes is so much faster. I dont wanna miss it. Since 1.18 its very 
stable and IMO more bug free then javac itself.

> > I know Ant
> > supports alternate compilers, but this wouldn't exactly be very
> > clear to someone who wants to use Ant in the same way as make
> > ('make' --> 'ant').
>
> The whole point of ant is to throw away make; Java programmers
> program java because its easier to use the tools. Most have no idea
> if they are using spaces or tabs (for instance). This means that
> they all curse like hell if they have to edit a Makefile and it
> won't work because it needs a tab at begin of line.
> There are dozens of reasons why ant is 'better' then make; it has
> been created as a replacement for make after all...
>
> > One of the reasons that I think the autoconf/make stuff is
> > still a superior solution, even for Java, is that these solutions
> > tend to detect what a user actually has, instead of defaulting to
> > Sun's JVM. Apologies if some of this is wrong, but this is the
> > impression I, and I guess other users, get of the Ant/Tomcat
> > situation.
>
> The only answer I can give is that a superior technology that has
> poor usability tends to be replaced.

The autofriends vs. ant choice is no once and forever choice. one 
project can use autofriends and anohter ant. Let the developers 
developing a software decide what they use. Dont try to get them 
follow your thoughts. They know best why they choose one over the 
other. There are many known problems with autofriends but there are 
not less other known problems with ant.


Michael
- -- 
Homepage: http://www.worldforge.org/
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQFAtbQqWSOgCCdjSDsRAukAAJ0VV6+TXcj8TK+JKTWrGM72eQshFACdFjBf
acNYpgb6hkzkdllRFwC3tsI=
=LVtw
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----