On Jun 5, 2005, at 10:06 PM, Craig Blake wrote:
One potential use is for companies (and individuals) to work around
particular performance limitations and bugs in the Sun VM while
keeping the libraries they know inside and out. I imagine that
could become common if Harmony ends up being as modular as we all
hope.
I am curious as to how much of the standard libraries would be
rendered non-functional without the VM specific classes from Sun,
however.
Agreed. But there is a reasonable argument to be made that it's in
Sun's interest too to see a common interface/bridge/foo between the
VM and class library, so lets not count them out of this. This is a
long project, and it's still early :)
geir
Craig Blake
On Jun 5, 2005, at 5:32 PM, Peter Donald wrote:
Hi,
It seems like there is a little bit of heat being generated by
this topic due to confusion. While Geir has not actually stated
this anywhere I assume that the reason that he is advocating for a
VM interface that is independent of GNU Classpath is because he
has plans to interoperate with other class libraries.
I assume that if the Harmony JVM gets half as good as is hoped
there will be companys who want to adopt the JVM but continue to
use Suns class library so that differences in libraries don't hurt
their customers.
Consider IBM - There are a few people here (both active and
lurkers) that are IBMers. They have publicly showed support for an
open source JVM on numerous occasions and I am sure they would
benefit considerably (as would Harmony) if this project was to get
to that stage. However I suspect that it is likely that they want
to stick with a derivative of Suns rt.jar for the moment. The
reason being that their customers do not want to be exposed to
differences between rt.jar and GNU Classpath. Given that IBM has
already re-written large chunks of the JVM I suspect that over
time they may move piecemeal to an OSS class library - at a pace
at which they can verify it matches Suns behaviour.
Another possibility would be the people from Brazil who are
starting their own JVM and I would not be surprised if at some
point someone wants to reimplement the class library using with a
ASL/MIT or other license with fewer restrictions.
I could be wrong but I guess the idea is to keep the options open
and encourage collaboration with both big buisness and other OSS
projects.
---
Cheers,
Peter Donald
*------------------------------------------------*
| You can't wake a person who is pretending |
| to be asleep. -Navajo Proverb. |
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--
Geir Magnusson Jr +1-203-665-6437
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
