GNU java toolchain

General Discussions
#1

Just to let people know that there has been some exciting progress in the GNU java toolchain as of late. At this point gcj/gij can compile .java and .class files to native code, intrerpret .class files dynamically, and many other items. It is to the point where Fedora Core 4 will ship with it installed and enabled by default as well as eclipse running nativly compiled for the platform.

The biggest failure of this toolchain is the fact that the GUI parts are incomplete. This is not a problem though for those who use SWT or bypass AWT and use OpenGL or other native libraries directly. For many of you this could be a replacement for jet and allow you to distribute native executables to populat platforms and still retain compatibility by supporting interpreted/jit compilation as well.

For those interested … here is a flash demo of using eclipse and glade to develop native gnome applications. ( http://people.redhat.com/overholt/nativeeclipse/index.html )

#2

Fundamentally: have we got full direct buffer support? Does it work with LWJGL? If it works out then I’m there!

Cas :slight_smile:

#3

Yes very intereting, please continue… :slight_smile:

#4

Apparently they’ve just (well since FEB) got the JAWT stuff to work so alledgedly JOGL will will compile and work out of the box. According to the website at least. I’m a little skeptical. I’m installing it at the moment, see what the story is.

theres a list of where to get the stuff and installation instructions for windows machines here:

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-nativegui2/sidefile-nativegui2.html

in case anyone else wants to give it a gander.

D.

-edit-
some of the links above are broken so for convenience sakes, you can get all the stuff directly through the following URL:
http://www.mingw.org/

and of course the GCJ URL is:
http://gcc.gnu.org/java/

-edit-

#5

Cool :slight_smile:

Keep us posted of your progress

Cheers
// Tomas

#6

[quote]Cool :slight_smile:
Keep us posted of your progress
[/quote]
oh. Sadly there is none. I was hoping it -would- actually just work. I got it working with simple hello world stuff but anything with AWT crapped out with a class not found exception. Thats either my setup or the legion of problems that GCJ has with AWT. I was too tired last night to do anything other than ‘meh’ when it didn’t work off the bat. I’m gonna give it some more time when i have a chance.

D.

#7

I’ve had (albe it fairly limited) sucsess with gcj (default CYGWIN built), SWT and SwingWT in the past. Looks quite promising, but a bit of a bugger to set up, and way to many hoops to jump through.

I ended up bitting the bullet, and using C++ and wx. :slight_smile:

#8

For the last 2/3 days I have been trying to install an alternative virtual machine and/or class API.I have downloaded kaffe, mingW32 and cygWin, so I have probably 2 versions of gcc installed.
Unfortunately, not being a linux guy makes it very difficult.Last night I just fell asleep on the computer trying to understand everything and make it work.
Sadly it will be a while until something popular and easy to use appears.

#9

As soon as I have FC4 installed I will give LWJGL a try…

This toolchain is definatly not for any for any sort of AWT/Swing development, but LWJGL should work. The only thing that might hold it up is the native code may need to be re-compiled for CNI rather than JNI.

I’ll post again when it’s working.