On Jan 31, 2006, at 1:00 PM, Roman Kennke wrote: > Hi Casey, > > Am Dienstag, den 31.01.2006, 12:37 -0800 schrieb Casey Marshall: >> On Jan 31, 2006, at 11:32 AM, Roman Kennke wrote: >> >>> Hi Brian, hi list, >>> >>>> Yea, I think the point for me would be to keep Classpath's java >>>> hackers >>>> out of the business of writing native code, and especially out >>>> of the >>>> business of porting native code for such common idioms as generic >>>> file >>>> operations, network operations, etc. >>> >>> BTW, Torsten, the man who first wrote the target native layer, >>> mostly >>> works on native code and porting of this to platforms you would not >>> dream of. >> >> That is arrogant. I'm sure everyone here who hacks on Classpath has >> worked with interesting technologies, and are all great engineers, >> each in his own right. >> >> So let's stop measuring cocks here, OK? > > Sorry, I didn't want to sound arrogant or whatnot. I am only a bit > upset > about this braindead discussion again. I'm sure some of us do appreciate the discussion, and don't find it brain-dead in the least. You have your own goals, and have made up your mind about POSIX and autoconf, that is clear, so you can feel free to ignore this discussion. > I get the impression that there > is a general opposition against real portability concerns within > the GNU > (Classpath?) project. Correct me if I am wrong. I think you're mistaken, if you think it is mere opposition. We have, like Per said in another reply, a portability layer already, and it is POSIX. It's an established standard, and it is available on many free (and non-free) platforms today, all of which we desire our code to run on with the highest priority. To put it a little more bluntly, and to paraphrase David Wallace, we can really only love what we value. Portability for the sake of platforms we don't use, or even know the names of, is not something we find immediately valuable. > There certainly are > parties that have portability demands that go beyong posix. Granted, > Aicas is a commercial party and cannot publish every port. There is > also > Kaffe, which is 100% GPL and now also suggest something similar > like the > target layer, only somewhat nicer, and again it seems to turn out > to be > a fight against windmills. > I don't get the windmills reference, but I think I get your point. With Kaffe, it isn't completely clear to me what the issues are, and how a native portability layer solves them. > But after all, that is what we have the VM interface for and I for > myself don't want to discuss C issues anymore and instead > concentrate on > getting the VM interface into a good shape (it already is IMO, needs > some tweaks though) and let people with different opinions on native > code fork/implement their own stuff below the VM interface. > Yes, that is the best idea, I think. I still want to see a nice POSIXy reference implementation, though, even if it is only for the selfish reason so I can run jamvm on my OS X and GNU/Linux machines to test out code.
